Tau'ri Alpha: The Beginning
by PenguinMints
Summary: Two years after defeating Anubis, the SGC creates a new Alpha Base, with its own field teams. This is the story of Tau'ri Alpha, and of the men and women who serve there.
1. Prelude

Well... here we go. My first fanfic of any kind, and the first in the only fanfiction story arc I ever intend to write. It'll be quite epic, though, I can guarantee at least that much.

This is the story of a new off-world base, and a new group of men and women who carry on the legacy of the original SG teams...

The timeframe: about two years after the end of Season 7. Minor breaks from the SG-1 universe: Hammond has been reinstated as SGC commander, and O'Neill remains with SG-1 after Season 7.

Disclaimer: I don't own SG-1 or its characters. I do, however, own any and all characters who do not appear in the television series. 

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2006

1000 HOURS  


  
"Chevron seven locked," the now-familiar voice of Sergeant Davis boomed over the intercom.  
  
CHUNK! CHUNK! CHUNK! WHOOOOOSH!!!  
  
Twelve faces watched and waited expectantly as the wormhole's event horizon fell back into a glowing, rippling pool two stories high.  
  
"Alpha One, Alpha Two, and Alpha Three, you have a go," Davis said.  
  
Lt Col. Phil Davenport glanced at his new charges, and then at the two teams standing behind his. Some of the newer people were still staring at the Stargate, mouths agape as they took in the awesome reality of what they were about to do. All three of the teams in the Gate Room - Alpha One, Two, and Three - were brand new, and while every incoming recruit had been briefed on the Stargate, eight of the twelve people about to go through the Gate had never been in this room before.  
  
Davenport had been there, done that for four years, the last two as 2IC of SG-5. So had the other two team leaders, Maj. Patrick Lindsay of Alpha Two, formerly CO of SG-14, and Maj. Andy Szeja of Alpha Three, who had been 2IC of SG-4. This would also probably be his safest trip ever: the destination would be the new Alpha Base that had just been completed the previous week, replacing the old Alpha Site which had been destroyed by the Goa'uld. The teams would be moving into their new quarters and touring the base, nothing more.  
  
The new Alpha Base was a huge improvement, heavily fortified with anti- aircraft batteries, artillery and machine-gun emplacements, razor wire, and even an underground hangar for a squadron of the state-of-the-art F-315B Ghost fighters that now patrolled in low Earth orbit. Eighteen field teams would operate out of it, in eight-month rotations. For now it was being run by a skeleton crew, but within the next three days twelve teams would begin their first tour of duty off-world, along with an entire base staff. Alpha One was the first of these teams.  
  
Although he knew that very little could possibly happen now, Davenport couldn't help but feel a little apprehension. He was leaving behind an entire life on Earth for eight months. He'd been away for weeks at a time before, but eight months was a completely new level of commitment. It wasn't nearly as bad for him as for some of the others - after all, at 36 he was young for a lieutenant colonel, and still a bachelor - but it meant he'd have to put on hold the bar-hopping, the Ferrari, and other bits of his bon vivant off-duty life. And there was the responsibility part of the equation. It was a huge honor to be picked by Jack O'Neill himself to lead the team, but with that would come responsibility for a lot of Alpha Base's day-to-day operations. At least O'Neill had brought in a Pentagon desk jockey to be his executive officer. Davenport allowed himself a slight grimace at the thought. He'd never suspected that he'd ever appreciate one of those people.  
  
Capt. Martin Pasanen, his second in command, looked far more nonchalant. To Pasanen, a member of SG-20 for the past year, it didn't mean nearly as much - sleeping in a different place at night, no more, no less. As a sniper, he didn't care as long as he still got to take pot shots at Goa'ulds and Jaffa, and as long as O'Neill would ignore the regulations enough to let him keep his goatee. Judging from what he knew of the General, the chances of that were fairly good.  
  
2nd Lt. Kat Fletcher had been literally bouncing off the walls in anticipation before arriving at the Gate Room, but now the petite blonde stood staring at the Stargate, eyes wide with amazement. She smiled nervously at her teammates. Just nineteen years old, she was really still a girl, almost young enough to be the daughter of some of the other field personnel. At an age at which most girls thought mainly about boys, parties, and makeup, Fletcher had already finished college, earned a master's degree, dropped out of grad school, joined the Army Reserve, and seen combat in Afghanistan. And now traveling to other planets would top all of them. She'd just joined the active-duty Army a few months ago, and Alpha Base would be her first assignment, which made everything that much harder to take in all at once.  
  
"Join the army, see the world, they said," she observed wryly. "'Cept they never mentioned other worlds."  
  
"I know what you mean," said Dr. Kevin Hsu, the last member of Alpha One. "I've been around here for a while now and I'm still not used to it."  
  
Dr. Hsu may have been on his first field assignment, but he'd worked for the SGC for two full years as a neurologist working with some of the world's worst neurological nightmares. He also spoke a dozen languages, a talent that resulted in his selection to Alpha One doubling as field medic and linguist. Hsu felt strangely calm for being about to move halfway across the galaxy; perhaps it was the knowledge that his wife would follow within the week that made the trip feel less like a break of routine. Abby Powers-Hsu had joined the SGC medical staff a few months after him, and would soon be the top civilian on the Alpha Base medical staff. Kevin saw her appear in the control room window, and waved.  
  
Just as Davenport started to step forward, Sergeant Davis stopped him. "One moment please, Alpha One."  
  
"What's the holdup?" Davenport asked no one in particular. He was answered as one of the doors slid open to reveal a reporter and camera crew, with a microphone ready to stick in his face in a few moments. "Good grief!" he exclaimed.  
  
The next voice, which came over the intercom, echoed his sentiments. "What's going on over there?" someone at the other end of the wormhole radioed back. "The Gate's been open for three minutes and I don't see anyone coming."  
  
"CNN wants an interview with Davenport, sir," Davis quickly explained. Davenport buried his face in his hands, while the CNN crew looked on in confusion, and other members of the Alpha teams tried to hide their amusement at the "accident." The intercom was still on, and chances were Davis knew it full well. Since the SGC had been revealed to the public two years ago, Davis had pulled that stunt several times, to the collective annoyance of the national media.  
  
"CNN? For crying out loud! I never asked..." the voice said before being cut off with a click.  
  
"Sorry, miss, I'd love to stick around and chat, but I have orders," Davenport told the reporter before she had a chance to shove the microphone at him. He wheeled smartly and marched up the ramp, his team in tow.  
  
"Sir! Just two minutes!" the reporter pleaded, in vain. Without looking back, Davenport and Pasanen stepped through the Stargate, leaving behind a very flustered reporter and a frustrated camera crew.  
  
Fletcher and Hsu paused at the top of the ramp.  
  
"It's beautiful," Fletcher whispered. "Have you done this before?"  
  
"First time," Hsu answered. "We're in the same boat." He touched the event horizon uncertainly with a finger.  
  
"Good time to jump out of it. Ready?"  
  
As the boots of Alpha Two began to rattle the metal ramp, the pair stepped forward and disappeared into the event horizon. 


	2. Promotion

MONDAY, JAN. 30, 2006

1100 HOURS  


  
  
BZZZZZZT!  
  
The inside of Jack O'Neill's head pounded as he rolled out of bed and cursed the alarm clock. Dammit, why couldn't he go home like the rest of his team? SG-1 had just barely escaped from the snake-heads with their lives yesterday, and when they arrived at base Hammond let them go home and take the whole week off after a mercifully short debriefing. All but one. Jack didn't understand it. He was the one who'd been under Baal's hand device for a good minute and a half, and Hammond wanted him, of all people, to stick around on base for an extra day.  
  
Half an hour later, he stepped into the briefing room, only slightly less irritated than when he woke up, for his weekly meeting with General Hammond. O'Neill hated these meetings - there was rarely anything mentioned except status updates on all the other SG teams - but as base 2IC he had to go to them, because if anything happened to Hammond he would end up in charge. Still, Jack wondered why Hammond had insisted that he show up this particular week. He'd never been asked before to be there less than 24 hours after almost being killed - and he'd come close to death on many occasions. Hell, he'd even clinically died a few times only to be brought back. The general was already there, and motioned for him to sit down.  
  
"Good morning, Jack," Hammond greeted him. "I hope you slept well last night?"  
  
"Could have been worse," O'Neill answered cautiously, already suspecting that something big had happened while he and his team were off-world. "Can I assume something big happened while I was out, sir?"  
  
Hammond was terse. "Cimmeria got wiped out two days ago."  
  
"Cimmeria?" O'Neill tried to hide his shock.  
  
"Orbital bombardment, and then death gliders and Jaffa on the ground to mop up. Half a dozen survivors came through the gate Saturday morning. We sent a UAV through last night, and everything within sixty miles of the gate was just flattened. No sign of life, no sign of the Goa'uld. As far as we know they made a clean getaway."  
  
"But wasn't Thor supposed to be keeping an eye on that planet?"  
  
"You know the score, Jack. The Asgard are fighting for their lives right now. They recalled their whole fleet to fight the Replicators, so nothing's left patrolling our galaxy. You know it, I know it, and now it seems the System Lords know it. I personally told Thor about it, and there's a ship on its way now, but I seriously doubt that they're going to find whoever did this. By the time the Asgard get there, the Goa'uld will be long gone."  
  
"I see."  
  
"We're stretched too thin. We have, what, twenty-two teams?"  
  
"Twenty-four in a couple weeks, sir, when the Brits move in."  
  
"That's nowhere near enough to both keep ourselves protected and cover all our commitments. We've got so many friends now that just keeping contact with all of them is straining our resources. The System Lords haven't been able to get at Earth for a while, but they've been hitting our allies one by one, and it's only a matter of time before they make another attempt on us. I've been talking to Washington, and they think we should expand our operations. Even Kinsey's in agreement on this one now."  
  
"By expand, you mean...?" the colonel started, interested in what the eggheads in Washington had in mind.  
  
"We're going to almost double the size of the operation. The Pentagon approved 18 new teams to bring us to 42. That'll be 16 regular SG teams and two Marine combat squads."  
  
"And we plan to house this many people how?."  
  
"That's what I told them," Hammond replied. "They want to start a permanent off-world base of operations within the next eight months. When you get back next week your next mission will be to find a suitable planet."  
  
"You kept me on base to tell me THAT?!" O'Neill protested, rising from his seat. "You could have waited until..."  
  
"Sit down, Colonel, I'm not done yet!" Hammond snapped. "Thank you," he said in a calmer voice as Jack sat down again.  
  
O'Neill took a deep breath. "All right, what is it?" he asked quietly, obviously annoyed.  
  
"I'm telling you this because I need you to pick the field teams. I'm already handling the base personnel decisions, throwing the field teams on top of it would be too much."  
  
"Sir, that's 76 people."  
  
"I didn't say it would be easy. It'll probably take at least a month, so the sooner you start, the better."  
  
"OK, but why me?"  
  
"Because... ... well, I might as well tell you now. You're taking command of all these people when the base is set up."  
  
The enormity of it took some time to hit O'Neill. If they held to Hammond's timeline, then within eight months SG-1 would be no more. Or at least the SG-1 that he knew. And it was a desk job. Hammond could see the disappointment on his face.  
  
"Is that all, sir?" O'Neill kept his poker face. He'd seen it coming for years, but that didn't make him feel any better when it actually did.  
  
"Pretty much," Hammond answered. "Oh, a couple things. I was up all night whittling the list of off-base candidates to under 200. That should help you a bit. I had the files delivered to your office this morning. Any of our field personnel who aren't COs are fair game too, but you'll have to replace anyone you pick off the existing teams. Oh, and if you want to, go ahead and let the others know what's going on. Have a good break, and see you next week."  
  
MONDAY, JAN. 30, 2006 1300 HOURS  
  
"So he's kicking me upstairs and making me a paper shuffler," O'Neill fumed.  
  
"Jack, maybe he's right," Samantha Carter said from the other end of the phone line.  
  
"You too, Carter? Please tell me I'm hallucinating."  
  
"It's been an amazing eight and a half years... but I'm not sure I want to keep doing this for much longer. Daniel's been offered tenure at a dozen big-name universities, and I think he's ready for a change of pace. Teal'c... his plate's full, between SG-1, training recruits both for us and the Free Jaffa, and getting ready to take Bra'tac's place. And think about Cassie, sir... she may be in college now, but now we're the only family she's got."  
  
"So I'm the only one who doesn't feel like standing down?"  
  
"No, no, no!" Carter exclaimed. "All I'm saying is, maybe it's time. You've turned down command of the SGC how many times?"  
  
"For crying out loud! Do you have to keep reminding me, Carter?"  
  
"Sorry, sir."  
  
"And it's only twice so far, ya know?"  
  
"Seemed like more."  
  
O'Neill couldn't tell any more if his 2IC was being serious or flippant. Just in case... "So I try to make myself clear when I'm objecting, you know that."  
  
Carter sighed loudly, exasperated. "Look, if it's just action you want, I can't think of a better command assignment. Even if it's a desk job, it's a desk job thirty thousand light-years from Earth."  
  
"That makes me feel a whole lot better already," O'Neill deadpanned. Even over the phone, his sarcasm was obvious.  
  
"At least think about it for now, Jack. Just think about it."  
  
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And so it begins... any thoughts/tips/critiques? Please review, and let me know how you think this is shaping up! More chapters coming as I write them... 


	3. Moving Forward

THURSDAY, FEB. 2, 2006

1600 HOURS

Daniel Jackson and Teal'c let themselves into O'Neill's house with one of the spare keys that he had given to each member of SG-1, and walked into the living room to find it looking very different from the usual mess. The coffee table was piled high with what appeared to be personnel files, and O'Neill himself was sitting on the couch, hands on his laptop computer, with a projector on the coffee table spreading the image on his screen over most of the opposite wall. The big-screen TV had been moved out of the way. At the moment, introductory pages from people's files, with basic information and photos, were appearing on the wall, one after another, in rapid succession. It was a good thing Hammond had supplied a CD-ROM to go with the files - while O'Neill disliked staring at computer monitors for extended periods of time it was a whole lot easier at the moment than juggling two hundred manila folders. As the voices and footsteps of his teammates drew closer, he stopped flipping.  
  
On the wall now was a young, dark-skinned man in fatigues, with a distance runner's build. "Captain David Allen Emory," Jack intoned. "Computer specialist, just about the best hacker the Air Force has right now. Has a reputation as a safecracker. Tops on most of the physical fitness tests too. Whaddaya kids think?"  
  
"Jack, something's obviously going on that you haven't told us," Daniel said, gesturing at the coffee table, after the surprise wore off. "What's all this stuff supposed to mean?"  
  
"Take a seat... it's a bit of a story." O'Neill went on to explain what Gen. Hammond had told him on Monday.  
  
"Congratulations, O'Neill," Teal'c said after he was done.   
  
"I'm getting a desk job," the colonel insisted glumly.  
  
Teal'c raised an eyebrow, in one of the myriad ways he could do it. "Are you not being rewarded for your skill and loyalty?"  
  
"They call it a reward."  
  
"I do not understand."  
  
"You've seen Hammond, Teal'c. Would he inspire a whole lot of confidence in a firefight?" O'Neill paused theatrically. "He used to be an ace pilot, you know. Before he became a general and started spending his life pushing papers. Nothing against Hammond, of course, I like the guy but I'm just not in a hurry to be him."  
  
"Then you fear that a promotion would cause you to lose your abilities as a warrior."  
  
"Jack, we all have to retire at some time or another." Daniel Jackson finally managed to get a word in edgewise. "The question is, how?"  
  
"I can still think of a thousand other pursuits more interesting than paperwork."  
  
"He's only got so much of it because he talks to everyone directly and refuses to get a secretary," Jackson reasoned.  
  
O'Neill did not respond. He stood up and walked stiffly to the kitchen, feeling a twinge in his left knee and only now realizing that it had been bothering him for the last six months. "You have a point," he said, turning around slowly. As much as it pained him to admit it, the promotion made sense. "So, Danny boy, I hear the eggheads are falling over themselves to have you back."  
  
"Yeah, it's not even news. Yale, Stanford, Michigan, you name it, it's a who's who of archaeology departments in this country. Lining up outside my door since that press conference, and not only for me either. Sarah too."  
  
"Six-figure salary offers, I take it?"  
  
Jackson nodded.  
  
"Well, you've always wanted tenure, here's your chance."  
  
"Jack, you know me well enough. I'm going to see SG-1 through to the end. After that, I might take up one of them. If you and Hammond don't mind the catch."  
  
"The catch?" O'Neill blinked.  
  
"Dibs on SGC artifacts."  
  
"They never get it, do they?" O'Neill exclaimed rhetorically.  
  
Teal'c picked this time to bring up another idea. "Could you not work at the Academy in Colorado Springs, Daniel Jackson?"  
  
"There's, uh, no archaeology department at the Air Force Academy."  
  
"Why not start one?" O'Neill suggested. "It's long overdue. The Air Force runs the Stargate program, and as much as I make fun of those rocks you look at all day, they're still our rocks. Anything to drink?"  
  
"No, thanks," said Jackson.  
  
Teal'c thought for a moment, then said, "I would like Coca-Cola."  
  
"One Coke, coming right up." O'Neill poured Teal'c a tall glass, then a glass of water for himself, before starting back toward the living room. "As I was saying, I was just going over some of these files..."

MONDAY, FEB. 21, 2006

1300 HOURS

SG-1 emerged from the Stargate in the back of a large round cavern about a hundred feet in diameter. The walls were smooth and bare, and only a few stalactites adorned the ceiling. For a cave, it seemed very well-lit, and the air was surprisingly fresh.  
  
"It wasn't this bright when we sent the MALP," Jackson remarked.  
  
"Amazing what six hours can do for the lighting, isn't it?" O'Neill replied sarcastically.  
  
"Only the one exit," Carter reported, pointing at a large passage directly opposite the Stargate. She was the first to don the night-vision goggles they had brought, and was looking over the back wall of the cave for any other openings that the MALP had missed.  
  
"All right, campers, let's move out," O'Neill finally said. "Let's hope this one isn't the disaster the last two were." The search for an Alpha Base location was starting to get tedious. As soon as Carter had been selected as chief science officer for the new base, SG-1 started receiving most of the scouting missions, being the group of people with the greatest stake in their success.  
  
"The third time is a magical ornament," Teal'c noted in his usual deadpan.  
  
"Charm, Teal'c, third time's a charm!"  
  
They had only traveled fifty feet down the passage when they were bathed in sunlight. From there, the passage curved about sixty degrees to the right and slightly downward before emerging from the side of a mountain.  
  
The view from the mouth of the cave was breathtaking. It opened two hundred feet above the floor of an alpine valley, with snow-capped peaks on the opposite side. To the left - the north according to O'Neill's compass - was the beginning of a forest, which extended downhill as far as the eye could see, the slope interrupted only by a large pyramid-shaped hill. From above SG-1, a small stream flowed down the mountain, through a wide patch of shrubbery and into a crystal-clear lake below.  
  
"Best place yet," Carter said. "Clean, no sign of recent settlement, not too hard to defend if the Goa'uld find us... and a great view too."  
  
"All right, people, as soon as we're done admiring the scenery" - O'Neill waived a hand across the horizon - "we'll start moving downhill."  
  
They followed the stream down the side of the mountain, seeing no sign that anyone had been in the area recently. But as they reached the shrubbery, they stumbled upon a cluster of bent, badly-rusted metal plates - some of them looking suspiciously like the remains of Jaffa armor.  
  
O'Neill suddenly made a new connection in his mind. "Carter, take a look at that pyramid-shaped hill over there. And pass me the binoculars when you're done."  
  
Carter took a bit longer to realize the significance, but her jaw dropped when she got a closer look at the hill. Although it was overgrown with vegetation, it still bore many of the features of an old Goa'uld pyramid ship.


	4. Groundwork

MONDAY, FEB. 21, 2006  
1430 HOURS  
  
"It cannot be recent," Teal'c stated categorically. "The last pyramid ship was scrapped six years ago. The armor on the ground must be as old."  
  
"I would tend to agree," Jackson said. "That looks like centuries' worth of vegetation."  
  
"I don't care," said O'Neill. "We've got a big honkin' mothership here that no one told us about, and I'm not about to go anywhere until we have backup, at least in radio contact."  
  
Someone at the SGC apparently agreed, because SG-2 emerged from the Stargate cave less than half an hour later and began setting up a defensive perimeter. O'Neill ordered them to blow up the cave if SG-1 didn't return within six hours, and then SG-1 started the long walk toward the pyramid ship.  
  
The interior was empty, as expected. Or rather, not empty: soil was everywhere, and plants grew in all of the many places where the outer wall had been breached. SG-1 slowly picked their way upward through the wreckage, finding no sign of anyone having been there recently.  
  
About halfway up, Jackson found a section of wall on which the inscriptions were largely intact. "Take a look at this," he told the others. "This ship belongs to - belonged to - Ra himself."  
  
"Then I know where we are, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c answered. "This system is known as Attyo. Its very name is anathema to the System Lords."  
  
"What happened here?" Jackson asked, his curiosity piqued.  
  
"Ra sent a great war fleet to this system to destroy an outpost of the Furlings. The fleet reported complete victory in its last transmission. But none of the ships returned."  
  
"How long ago was this?"  
  
"Approximately four thousand years ago, Daniel Jackson."  
  
Daniel nodded and SG-1 went on their way again. They reached the top level without further incident to find the door to the bridge shut and locked..  
  
"Any guesses?" O'Neill asked rhetorically.  
  
Teal'c was quick to answer anyway. "Colonel O'Neill, it appears as if the remaining crew barricaded themselves on the bridge."  
  
"Hard to see them, sir, but infrared still shows staff blasts all over the corridor," Carter added. "And there's all this armor scattered around."  
  
"OK, so there's been a fight," O'Neill said. "Anyone else anxious to find out what happened here?"  
  
"Uh, yes, but... how?" Jackson replied quietly.  
  
Without hesitation, O'Neill pulled out a small C4 charge and placed it at the foot of the door. Once the entire team was safely around the nearest corner, he detonated it.   
  
A loose girder started to slide as a result of the vibrations. "Look out!" the colonel shouted as he realized that Jackson was directly underneath it. The archaeologist looked up just in time to see it begin to tip and fall, and dove out of the way, landing against a pillar which knocked the wind out of him.  
  
"You okay, Danny?" O'Neill asked.  
  
"Yeah, I'll be fine. Just hafta catch my breath. You guys go ahead."  
  
Having decided this ship was perfectly safe, the other three members of SG-1 went back around the corner to the now-open bridge. O'Neill's radio crackled. "What was that?" a surprised-sounding voice asked.  
  
"Just had to break down a door," he answered nonchalantly. Smoke wafted upward through a gaping hole in the ceiling just outside the bridge area. SG-2 must have seen the flash and the smoke from the explosion.  
  
A cursory examination of the bridge found that it was still sealed - or had been until the door had been unceremoniously ripped from its frame. The fate of the lone occupant was again clear. The corpse had been well-preserved in the stale air; a few feet away lay the desiccated remains of a Goa'uld symbiote. They radioed back the information. No signs of Goa'uld presence nearby, though Carter was quick to recommended a UAV survey of the area to make doubly sure. Then, on the way out of the bridge area, they ran straight into Daniel Jackson.  
  
The archaeologist was holding a hand-sized metal device with a small glasslike ring at one end.  
  
"What's that?" Carter asked.  
  
"Something I found in that big pile of dirt over there," Jackson answered.  
  
"Any idea what it does?"  
  
"It does not appear to be of Goa'uld origin," Teal'c observed.  
  
"Well, this looks like a push-button," Jackson said, pointing at a dimple in the upper surface, "but it's quite stuck." He jabbed at it with one finger, and nothing happened. He tried more forcefully, and suddenly the button yielded. A white beam shot out from the ring.   
  
"It is a weapon!" Teal'c shouted as Jackson struggled to keep the device under control. The trigger was stuck again, this time with the weapon firing. O'Neill didn't need to be told. He hit the deck before the last word was out of the Jaffa's mouth. The device finally fizzled out with a loud crack, its power source exhausted, but only after burning a dark line across at least thirty feet of wall.  
  
"Watch where you point those things!" O'Neill reprimanded Jackson. He scrambled to his feet - or tried to. As he planted his left foot, there was an audible pop, and with a groan, he sank back to the floor. In an instant all three of his teammates were at his side.  
  
"It's my knee," the colonel gasped between deep breaths as Teal'c and Carter laid him out on his back. "We're gonna have to... head back... Carter... radio for a stretcher." He handed his radio to his 2IC and dropped his head to the floor.

TUESDAY, FEB. 22, 2006  
1800 HOURS

"So we were just wasting our time exploring that wreck?! Why didn't you guys tell us earlier?" O'Neill, sitting bolt-upright on an infirmary cot, demanded.  
  
"Colonel O'Neill," Selmak patiently reminded him, "you could .have told us you were going there."  
  
"Not you too!" O'Neill muttered under his breath. He creased his brow, flustered. He didn't need both Jacob Carter and his snake ganging up on him like that. "Look, we've been over this already," he said aloud.  
  
The sound of the argument had drawn an audience, Jack observed with annoyance as Daniel Jackson and Teal'c appeared in the doorway. They were not the only ones. The doctor on duty, the short, stocky Asian man named Kevin Hsu, had also wandered closer, having little else to do on this particular day.  
  
Jacob/Selmak lowered his head. The voice that came out now was human. "Just making sure," Gen. he said calmly.  
  
"General Carter, I did not know you were here," Teal'c said he approached.  
  
Jackson launched immediately into archaeologist mode. "Jacob or Selmak, I was just wondering if you knew anything about this." He reached into a pocket and pulled out the weapon he had found. "We found it on P7S..."  
  
"335," Jacob interrupted him. "Jack just asked me about it." He turned to O'Neill. "Mind if I tell it again here?"  
  
It turned out that the Tok'ra had explored the planet three thousand years ago as a possible base, finding nothing but the wreckage of a Goa'uld warship. A discreet inquiry with an Asgard operative had given more information. Shortly after the destruction of the Furling base, the Goa'uld ships had been surprised by a combined Asgard and Furling fleet, which destroyed all but one in a thirty-minute battle. The surviving ship crash-landed on the nearest planet; there, an Asgard army came through the Stargate, cleared the ship floor by floor, and sealed the bridge to prevent the Goa'uld inside from escaping. A few Jaffa were shot down attempting to reach the Gate.  
  
"And the weapon?" Daniel had to ask to be sure.  
  
"It's an Asgard sidearm. This kind hasn't been used in over a millennium."  
  
There was a moment of silence as Daniel and Teal'c digested the information. "So if the Goa'uld have been there before..." Daniel started.  
  
"Then there shouldn't be much to worry about," Jacob Carter finished for him. "That's probably one of the better places to put a base - the System Lords will never look there without a really good reason."  
  
"But if the Tok'ra have explored the place since then..."  
  
"The Tok'ra don't have all the Goa'uld racial memories, Dr. Jackson. We split from them several centuries before that Goa'uld fleet disappeared. And with two minds working together in one body, one mind can overcome the other one's fears. The System Lords can't do that - they'll be terrified at the very thought of going to that place."  
  
"So why aren't the Tok'ra there?"  
  
"Because the fact that we had some contact with Asgard and Furling intelligence didn't mean their main battle fleets would be able to recognize us as Tok'ra."  
  
"OK, that's that," O'Neill said, interrupting Jacob's explanation. "Daniel, Teal'c... tell Hammond we're done searching."

FRIDAY, FEB. 25, 2006  
2030 HOURS

Drs. Kevin and Abigail Hsu had a simple rule: no talking about work at home. It was a hard rule to keep to sometimes, Kevin thought as he absent-mindedly shoved a plate into the dishwasher, reflecting on the latest medical dilemmas at the SGC. There always had to be something hanging over his head. He tried to push thoughts about symbiote hallucinogens out of his mind.  
  
."Don't think too hard, dear," Abby said as she walked by.  
  
Kevin didn't even ask. He knew she could read his mind, just like he could read hers. They went all the way back to high school. When Abby Powers moved to Houston after her freshman year in high school, no one really knew what to make of the new girl from Alaska. Kevin was one of her first friends. He still remembered seeing her standing outside, early in the morning in the middle of Houston's coldest winter in decades, in shorts, and telling him that was about as warm as Kotzebue, Alaska ever got. For Kevin, who had lived in the Middle East for some years, it was hard to imagine. But they had hit it off swimmingly from there, the son of the desert and the daughter of the remote Arctic, and even though they went to college and medical school in different states, their eventual engagement and marriage were virtually a foregone conclusion.  
  
So he tried to think about something else - which also turned out to concern his job.  
  
"So, uh, you've heard about the off-world colony plans?" he blurted out. Both of them had heard, separately, about Alpha Base. Neither had mentioned it to the other until now.  
  
"Yup. Heard all kinds of things about it. Word gets around fast." Abby didn't seem to mind the question, which was a good sign.  
  
"I was just thinking about it, since I heard O'Neill himself talking about it in the infirmary the other day."  
  
"Oh?"  
  
"They've picked a place. They start building as soon as they get the equipment over." He paused. "Just out of curiosity... would you go, if we were transferred over there?"  
  
The question would have been asked sooner or later, Kevin thought. He and Abby were the doctors on the two rapid-response medical teams that handled off-world emergencies. Because both had Gate travel experience, it was almost inevitable that one or both of them would have been offered a position at the new base.  
  
"I really don't know," Abby said. "I'd have to think about it. Might be nice to live off-world for a while, depending." 

FRIDAY, MAR. 25, 2006  
1100 HOURS

"Good morning, General O'Neill, and welcome to Alpha Base."  
  
The words surprised O'Neill, but he returned the salute that the Marine officer had given him. "Major... Krogstad," he started awkwardly, "how did you know so fast? I've only been a general for..." He looked at his watch. "Three and a half minutes." He'd literally received his star on the Gate room ramp, just before making the trip.  
  
"Hammond told us yesterday, actually," Jesse Krogstad answered. "Said something to the effect that you'd be a general the next time you showed up."  
  
"Gotta hand it to him. Have we met before?"  
  
"Briefly, I think," Krogstad said thoughtfully. He extended a hand. "Jesse Krogstad. I've been assigned as your base security chief."  
  
"Call me Jack. The title 'General' makes me feel old."  
  
"Will do. Need a hand, sir?"  
  
"Yeah, I'd appreciate it."  
  
As Krogstad picked up O'Neill's suitcase, the newly-minted general hobbled forward on his crutches. The Stargate was still in the same cavern he'd found it in a month earlier, but now it was well-lit, with banks of fluorescent lights extending across the ceiling. The floor was cleared of obstacles, though some debris remained. A steel-frame-and-plexiglass enclosure near the entrance would serve as a command post, and niches were cut into both side walls for use as machine gun emplacements.  
  
"Expecting anyone else today?" Krogstad asked suddenly.  
  
"Not sure," O'Neill answered. "Teal'c might be around today with some Free Jaffa reps."  
  
The two men rounded the corner and walked out into the sunlight. O'Neill almost couldn't believe the transformation he saw. A large cluster of buildings extended from just below the Stargate cave to the edge of the woods to the north. A short distance south of the main base was an airstrip. O'Neill was about to ask about it when a helicopter flew overhead, a steel I-beam dangling on a cable below it.  
  
"We're still putting up the last few buildings," Krogstad explained. "That includes a gatehouse over the mouth of this cave. All the medical facilities are gonna be up here." O'Neill nodded in agreement; having medical facilities close to the gate could mean the difference between life and death for a wounded soldier. Meanwhile, the major went on to point out completed buildings: a command center, research labs, barracks, supply depots.  
  
Then O'Neill's gaze fell on the lake. There was a pier jutting out into the water, with a skiff tied to it. "And that?" he asked, pointing.  
  
"Oh, that stuff's mine. We've had lots of downtime lately, not much for us security people to do since the Tok'ra unloaded their last shipment. I built the pier myself."  
  
O'Neill looked at Krogstad quzzically.  
  
"There's good fishing in that lake," Krogstad continued. "Not like back home, but it'll do."  
  
"Don't think I've ever asked... where are you from?"  
  
"Minnesota."  
  
"Dang. We have to talk fish some time," O'Neill remarked. "Should have packed a rod."  
  
"I think I have a couple extra," Krogstad said helpfully. "I was going to take the boat out today, as soon as you got settled in."  
  
The whoosh of an incoming wormhole, and the sound of footsteps coming across the cavern, announced another new arrival. "Hey, Teal'c," O'Neill called without even looking behind him. "Feel like doing a bit of fishing?"

=======================================================================================

I'm done with finals, which means more time to write. Thoughts so far? Comments? Suggestions? Anyone getting impatient for the beginning of the real plotline, or should I continue filling in backstory at the same pace?


	5. Alpha One

Author's note: all times are assumed to be Mountain Time (Colorado time) unless otherwise stated.  
  
==============================================================================================  
  
SATURDAY, APRIL 1, 2006  
2100 HOURS PDT  
  
Las Vegas, Martin Pasanen thought. Leave your inhibitions at the door, leave your money inside. He didn't know exactly how he'd ended up here, wearing a penguin suit and trying hard to look like a high roller, but he was fairly sure it had something to do with the man sitting at the bar next to him, tapping out the jazz band's beat with the poker chip in his hand.  
  
Phil Davenport finished his drink. "OK, I'm ready," he declared. "Let's go."  
  
"I still don't think this is a good idea, Phil," Pasanen said glumly. What a poseur, he thought to himself.  
  
"What could possibly be wrong with it? It's brilliant!"  
  
"And stupid, risky, and outrageous."  
  
The duo sidled through the crowd toward the nearest roulette table. "That's why it's so brilliant! Besides, I thought you nominated me to collect the money," Davenport argued.  
  
"I did, but... look, a lot of people are gonna be pissed if we lose. There's twenty bucks of my money in there."  
  
"C'mon, O'Neill deserves a kick-ass party. We could double our funds right now! And if we lose, it's out of my pocket." With that, Davenport pulled it all out: $2,250 in chips, the total donated by SGC personnel for a party to celebrate O'Neill's promotion.  
  
"Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets..."  
  
With great ceremony, he put it all on black. This was it: everything gambled on a single spin of the wheel. Time seemed to stop as the ball rolled around and around...  
  
Suddenly, Davenport's cell phone rang. He excused himself from the table and answered it. It was Hammond.  
  
"General Hammond! Is there an emergency?" Davenport asked.  
  
"Not in particular. I know you're on a 72-hour pass, just wanted to tell you that you've been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, effective as soon as you get back."  
  
Now this was totally unexpected. "Thank you, sir," Davenport responded, barely able to hide his surprise and elation. Did this mean he'd be taking command of his own team?  
  
"I was just wondering," the general added, "where you are at this moment. Sounds like a whole lot of action over there."  
  
"I'm, um, at the Nuggets game," the soon-to-be lieutenant colonel fibbed, moments after a loud cheer erupted from a nearby group of people.  
  
"That's funny," Hammond said. "You'd think from the crowd noise that the Nuggets weren't losing by 27 right now... make that 29."  
  
Davenport was speechless. He sidled over to look at a television screen showing ESPN. Among the NBA scores sliding across the screen in the bottom bar were the words: "SAN ANTONIO 96 DENVER 67 4TH QTR."  
  
Hammond continued. "Just a couple more things. Tell Pasanen he's been promoted too. And good luck."  
  
By the time Davenport got back to the roulette table, Pasanen was waiting for him - empty handed. "Twenty-three. Red," Pasanen said, matter-of-factly.  
  
"Aww, man..."  
  
TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 2006  
2300 HOURS  
  
"Sir, I think there's someone you'd be making a mistake not to include," Carter said.  
  
"This'd better be good," O'Neill grumbled. Ten weeks after he'd started looking through the files, after, in his own words, "burning copious quantities of midnight oil" in the past few days, he was done. And there'd be hell to pay if he had to make changes without a really good reason.  
  
"I just got a call from an old friend from the early days of the Stargate project. He's a professor at Caltech now."  
  
"And?"  
  
"He wanted to recommend one of his grad students. One Kathryn Fletcher." Carter tossed a file onto the desk.  
  
"Grad student from Caltech. Another scientist, Carter?" O'Neill raised an eyebrow, and glanced at the photograph paper-clipped to the front of the folder. It was slightly blurry and pixelated, probably taken with a cheap digital camera, but he could still see a childlike face framed by shoulder-length blond hair. Behind her head was some kind of control panel, and something that might be an oscilloscope - the kind of stuff he'd expect to find in Carter's lab. "Looks a bit young too." That was the understatement of the year, he thought - his first guess was thirteen or fourteen years old.  
  
"She's Army Reserve, sir. Corps of Engineers. I couldn't get an Army file on her on two hours' notice, but that's her academic record and whatever I could find of her service record on the Internet. The photo's a few years old, I think she was sixteen at the time."  
  
"OK, but why exactly do you want me to pick a grad-student-slash-Army-Reserve-engineer over all the people we've already got?"  
  
"Well, here's the situation. She wants out of academia, at least for now. Nick thinks it'd be a shame to see her brains go to waste."  
  
"That's what they said about Jay Felger."  
  
"Sir, I think we should give her a chance."  
  
"Frankly, the only difference I see is she's a lot younger, and female. That 'girl power' idea's nice and all, but the SGC can't exactly do affirmative action here."  
  
"Trust me, she's brilliant. Just open the file."  
  
O'Neill flipped open the folder. The first page was a master's diploma from Caltech, dated 2003. The next was a Bronze Star citation for a combat action in Afghanistan. He gave a short whistle.  
  
"Anything else you need to know?" Carter prodded him with the question.  
  
O'Neill groaned. "Yeah, what is it about everyone remotely associated with you, and making me feel inadequate?" First it had been Carter herself. Then Jennifer Hailey, now already a captain only five years out of the Academy, and 2IC of SG-2. After her, Carter had recruited 1st Lt. Viet Nguyen of SG-19, the wiry, hard-as-nails former Force Recon squad leader who had to be the best demolition man he'd ever seen. And now, apparently, she'd discovered Fletcher.  
  
"To tell you the truth, when I think about what I was doing at her age, she makes me feel a bit inadequate too," Carter admitted with a sheepish grin.  
  
"Good, that makes two."  
  
There was a knock, and the door to O'Neill's office swung open.  
  
"So what's our timeline?" asked Hammond as he leaned his considerable bulk against the door frame.  
  
"I'm thinking we get all our people here by the end of this month, and send the first nine teams over as soon as we're done building, the rest a couple weeks later. I'm hoping we can keep the SGC running smoothly while we're moving people in and out."  
  
Hammond nodded. "Got a team-by-team list yet?"  
  
"I'll come up with one by next week. Carter wanted to make some changes, so we're just talking about those right now."  
  
"Sounds good," Hammond said. "Just give me some time to look it over before it goes to the Pentagon." He turned and left just as abruptly as he came.  
  
TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 2006  
0200 HOURS  
  
It may have been late at night, but deep in the bowels of Cheyenne mountain, the SGC briefing room was brightly lit. Jack O'Neill glanced at his watch, just as the first two members of what would be his flagship team walked in and automatically took seats on O'Neill's right, facing the door. It was 2:00 in the morning. Right on time.  
  
"Good morning, Jack," the man next to O'Neill said cheerfully.  
  
"Top o' the morning to you," O'Neill answered, making a show of looking at his watch again. He knew the man well. Phil Davenport was a four-year veteran from SG-5, which had gone with SG-1 on several off-world missions in the past few years. More importantly, the two men played roller-hockey together whenever they had a chance. O'Neill had played center and Davenport had been the goalie for Cheyenne Mountain's entry into the Air Force tournament earlier this year.  
  
"So what's up tonight?"  
  
"Merry Christmas," O'Neill answered. "You're getting a command."   
  
"Oh, really?"  
  
"Usual gang of crazies and misfits, of course, except this time they're yours."  
  
"That's reassuring."  
  
"Good, I was hoping so."  
  
A singularly intense officer in the field, regardless of his colorful off-duty life, Davenport was one of the fastest-rising officers at the SGC and O'Neill didn't even hesitate when choosing him to lead the new base's flagship team. The younger man was like him in quite a few ways. Like his immediate superior, he kept his doctorate (O'Neill's in astronomy, Davenport's in chemical engineering) a secret from most others on base; he had been quietly involved in covert ops all over the Middle East before coming to the SGC; and as 2IC of SG-5 he had built up a reputation for driving both his CO and General Hammond up the wall with unsolicited smart-aleck remarks. He was also able to read the Goa'uld language, having gone off-roading around the desert with an Egyptologist while stationed at the American embassy in Cairo.  
  
On the same side of the table, Martin Pasanen just nodded, with a slight grin. Pasanen was a Special Forces sniper, the unique breed that was considered valuable enough to get away with openly flouting the regulations. It showed in his badly-trimmed goatee. If he hadn't been an officer, he'd have been the archetypal cynical Sergeant Major, O'Neill thought. But if his near-total lack of discipline was infuriating at times, his success rate was unquestionable. Before coming to the SGC, he'd won a Silver Star in the invasion of Afghanistan, singlehandedly capturing the entire crew of a "technical" by first shooting the machine gun off its swivel mount, then killing the driver and the vehicle commander with his next two bullets. On top of that, he'd picked up two Bronze Stars at the SGC. As the most decorated officer here, outside of SG-1 and SG-2, Pasanen had the Teal'c stamp of approval for 2IC.  
  
"Hello, cutie," Davenport said as the next arrival entered, still in civilian clothes.  
  
"Good Lord, she can't even be half your age," Pasanen hissed under his breath at his soon-to-be CO. O'Neill raised an eyebrow in his best impression of Teal'c.  
  
"That would be Lieutenant Cutie to you," the petite blonde riposted in a lilting soprano. Davenport's face flushed. Seeing O'Neill, in the room, the young woman stood to something resembling attention, bouncing slightly on her feet, and saluted. "Second Lieutenant Kathryn Fletcher reporting, sir!"  
  
O'Neill returned the salute. "At ease, Lieutenant. We're just having a friendly little chat tonight."  
  
2nd Lt. Kathryn Fletcher, US Army Corps of Engineers, literally jumped into the nearest chair and pulled her feet up into it. Damn, she was tiny, O'Neill thought, his doubts about her resurfacing. This was the one Carter was so adamant about including? Her file said she was nineteen years old, but she appeared even younger, and her slender build and delicate round face made her look very fragile indeed. She'd probably had to cheat just to make the Army's minimum weight requirement. No one doubted that she was brilliant - she had already earned a master's degree from Caltech by age sixteen, before dropping out of graduate school earlier this year - but her service record, a year and a half in an Army National Guard engineer battalion, was hardly long enough to say anything. And she was fidgeting in her chair - not unlike himself when he started out, O'Neill had to remind himself. Nevertheless, the alert blue eyes that caught his suggested that there was more to her than what he saw.  
  
"Sorry, sir," she said with a nervous smile. "It's the caffeine." She glanced at the faces around the table: Davenport slightly embarrassed, Pasanen more dubious than anything else, O'Neill trying hard to look nonchalant.  
  
The last member of the new team, a short, stocky Asian-American, arrived just as the clock hit 0205, looking like he'd just been dragged out of the lab. He probably had been. He was even wearing the obligatory long white coat and latex gloves.  
  
Dr. Kevin Hsu was not by any means new to the SGC, as anyone who passed through the infirmary could attest. Although no one could truly replace the late Janet Frasier, Hsu was one of several doctors who, put together, were possibly even more effective. A neurosurgeon by training, he had taken enough of an interest in linguistics to earn a master's degree in the field after becoming a doctor, which had repeatedly put him under consideration for a field team assignment. He looked a bit overweight, but his scores on the physical fitness tests actually came close to Special Forces requirements.  
  
"Timely as ever, Doc," O'Neill observed.  
  
"Is there an emergency, Colonel?" the doctor asked.  
  
"Not really," O'Neill said. "Just having a little chat. Take a seat."  
  
"If you don't mind... oh. It's about Alpha Base, isn't it? And why am I always the last one to hear about these things?" Hsu deposited himself in an empty chair as the presence of the other three people in the room finally registered his mind. Phil Davenport from SG-5, Martin Pasanen from SG-20... and some girl he'd never seen before, who seemed badly out of place. Did O'Neill have a daughter? If he did, then Hsu certainly didn't remember him ever mentioning it. Everyone knew about Charlie; he'd be twenty-four now if he were alive, which meant that this girl would be quite a bit younger...  
  
His absent-minded reverie was broken by O'Neill's voice. "I guess you're all wondering what the hell you're doing here at two in the morning." The colonel paused and looked around the room at four blank faces. "Well... we're here at two in the morning because Lieutenant Fletcher got her commission about thirty-six hours ago..."  
  
"Congratulations," Hsu said quietly.  
  
"Thanks," Fletcher answered.  
  
"...and the Army desk jockeys just couldn't seem to figure out how to transfer her from reserve enlisted in California to active-duty officer in Colorado without creating three nonexistent Kathryn Fletchers in the process."  
  
"Not that I mind the time," Fletcher said quickly as the laughter subsided. "I was a grad student just a few days ago, so that would make it just about lunchtime for me."  
  
"So how do we know you're not one of the nonexistent ones?" Pasanen couldn't resist asking. Fletcher said nothing, but a manic grin appeared on her face.  
  
"Back to business," O'Neill interrupted. "Yes, it's about Alpha Base, and it's not a coincidence that the three of you who are military all just got promoted. You four are going to be Alpha One... unless any of you asks out, that is."  
  
Phil Davenport couldn't believe it. Did Jack O'Neill trust him that much? Stargate teams were all elite units, but there was something about having the number one that scared him a little.  
  
"Alpha One, sir?"  
  
"Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. Can you think of a better man for the job who's not already leading an SG team?"  
  
"After Vegas?" That stunt was common knowledge around the base by now. The SGC grapevine was notoriously fast-growing.  
  
"I hope you learned something from it. Just promise me you won't put Alpha Base on the line on a poker game with Baal, OK?"  
  
"Damn, I was just about to do that too."  
  
O'Neill raised an eyebrow. "You do know he cheats at cards, I hope," he deadpanned.  
  
"Two can play at that game," Davenport said, smoothly pulling an ace and a king out of his sleeve.  
  
O'Neill grimaced, then turned his attention toward the other three. Pasanen was apparently finishing up Fletcher's Stargate 101 crash course - he'd just started explaining what Alpha Base was - while Hsu was interjecting a comment here and there as needed. The doctor swiveled his chair around to face O'Neill.  
  
"General O'Neill," he said, a bit stiffly, "it's an honor to be picked for Alpha One. But I'd like to talk to Abby before I decide if I'm in or out."  
  
"No need," O'Neill said. "I told her six hours ago, and she said yes. She's coming along too, as chief surgeon."  
  
The doctor relaxed visibly. "I'm in then."  
  
O'Neill then addressed the whole table. "It'll be about two months before the base is ready to start operating. That means you have a good bit of downtime before then. Davenport and Pasanen, your replacements at the SGC are joining their teams later this week, so we should be running pretty smoothly here. I suggest that you all take the next couple weeks off. You'll be training together for a while after that."  
  
"Sounds good to me," Pasanen said. "When do you want us back?"  
  
"Wednesday, May third. I'm having you guys train in Russia, actually," O'Neill said. "I see two of you haven't really been in cold weather much, and I'd like you all to be ready to handle any kind of weather conditions you run into on missions. Besides, the Russians are sending a couple teams over here soon, and they wanted to train with a few American teams beforehand. I'm sending you with four other Alpha teams, probably Two, Three, Six, and Seven."  
  
"We're working with the Russkies?" Pasanen had to ask.  
  
"They won't be at Alpha Base. They're sending two teams to operate out of the SGC. We'll have a Russian liaison around, but probably not more. Oh, that reminded me - try to keep the Russian press off our backs, they can get pretty vicious."  
  
"By Washington standards?" Davenport asked.  
  
"You'd be surprised," O'Neill replied without the slightest bit of humor in his voice. "Nye vot pravda v'izvestiye ni izvestia v'pravdye," he intoned cynically.  
  
"Ish?" Fletcher rested her head against one shoulder and looked generally perplexed. Everyone looked at her, before realizing one by one that she was probably the only one in the room who spoke no Russian.  
  
"There is no truth in the news, and no news in the truth," O'Neill finished. 


	6. The Troubleshooters

FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 2006  
1400 HOURS

Another afternoon, another set of people to talk to, O'Neill thought. At least this one would be interesting.  
  
Today he'd be meeting the commander and 2IC of Alpha Six, the rapid response team. The whole idea was O'Neill's own - if Alpha One was the flagship team, Alpha Six would be the troubleshooters, ready to go into a hot spot at a moment's notice. In many ways, this would be his most important team, the one assigned to do the impossible at times.  
  
First into O'Neill's office was the very beautiful 1st Lt. Marlena Paisley. She had been hand-picked specifically for the rapid response team, and would serve as its second-in-command. Paisley was a former racing driver, and her third-place finish in the Indy 500 a year ago was the best ever performance by a female competitor, possibly the best by a second-year driver. Being shy by nature, she had tried to avoid publicity, with little success. Eventually, the emergence on the Internet of photos from her brief and previously obscure modeling career was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Within days she had decided to run away from her celebrity status and join the Air Force - ironically creating yet another storm of publicity. But finally, in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain, the model-turned-race-car-driver-turned-fighter-pilot-turned-special-ops-soldier was glad to be away from it all.  
  
"Lieutenant Paisley, I presume," O'Neill said, as she stepped into the room. He motioned her toward a chair.  
  
Close on her heels was the commander of Alpha Six. He was the only newcomer to the Stargate program among all the team leaders, but a proven special ops squad leader nonetheless. Capt. John Gardiner, formerly in USMC Force Reconnaisance, had been, for the last two or three years, the man of choice whenever it became necessary to evacuate Americans caught in African civil wars, and whenever international terrorism reared its ugly head in Africa. To many Africans, he was known as the Red Ranger, in part for his hair color. Yet, for all his military accomplishments, he did not look very warlike in the setting of a conference room; his wire-rimmed glasses completed the image of a scholar rather than a soldier. Indeed, as the son of missionaries in East Africa, he had always considered his role to be that of peacemaker.  
  
"Captain Gardiner," O'Neill addressed the Marine, "How's Congo these days?"  
  
"Interesting," Gardiner answered noncommittally.  
  
"The usual gunfire, rhetoric, and international intrigue, then." O'Neill nodded.  
  
"Yeah, I guess you could say that. Same old, same old."  
  
"My regards to Monsieur Kabila, anyway. I hear you're a bit of a MacGyver type."  
  
"That's what the Americans always called me, at least" Gardiner said. "MacGuyver of Africa. What can I say? Been on the spot enough times, I guess. Gotta love African politics." Gardiner's improvisatory abilities were particularly famous. His most recent exploit was already legend: sneaking thirty Westerners to safety through two hundred miles of rebel-held territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, without having to fire a single shot.  
  
"I'm guessing you both already know exactly why you're here," O'Neill said as Gardiner sat down in the other empty chair. The two Alpha Six officers both nodded. "I'm going to be asking you to do a lot, being the professional troubleshooters that you are. Have you two met before?"  
  
Gardiner spoke first. "No, don't think so."  
  
"I guess some introductions are in order." He pointed to Gardiner. "Captain John Gardiner, US Marine Corps, just in from Kinshasa yesterday..."  
  
Paisley stopped him there. "I know who he is," she announced before O'Neill could finish. She turned to Gardiner. "You're the one who's evacuated people from all those wars in Africa - you're the Red Ranger, aren't you?" she asked with a distinct Texas drawl.  
  
"One and the same," Gardiner answered. Then his eyes widened in recognition. "Didn't you drive on the Indy-car circuit last year?"  
  
Paisley smiled. "That was me in the ugly purple car. Blame Yahoo for that. Do they follow auto racing at all in Africa?"  
  
"Lucky guess, that's all. One of my men in Congo and Sudan kept this picture over his bunk, said the girl in it was some famous race-car driver."  
  
"That would be the sweet little yellow bikini number?" O'Neill interrupted. "Sorry," he added as Paisley grimaced in exasperation.  
  
Gardiner just barely nodded, looking quite embarrassed himself. "Anyway, I never thought I'd see Marlene Paisley here, of all places."  
  
"Marlena," Paisley corrected him.  
  
"I guess we don't need introductions, then," O'Neill said, surprised at how much the two knew already. "So," he began, his voice returning to all-business, "Captain Gardiner, I think you'll find this assignment a whole lot more straightforward than African politics. As you may have read already, we have an obvious, well-defined enemy, which makes things a bit easier. Your team's going to be the rapid response squad, so it'll be pretty much the same kind of assignments you've had before. Mostly bringing our people home, and occasionally a diversionary attack or a covering action."  
  
"Sounds good," Gardiner said.  
  
"Paisley, you're going to be responsible for the rapid part of rapid response. Alpha Six is getting a fast attack vehicle - you wouln't believe how much trouble it was to get a couple of them from the SEALs. You get to drive that, or fly whatever aircraft or spacecraft the team needs to get somewhere. Everyone else on the team is also training to be able to take over in an emergency, but you're probably the best pilot we've got."  
  
Paisley nodded. "I'll try my best, sir. I've been on the death glider and tel'tac simulators pretty much every day."  
  
"Basically what we're asking from you is speed. As much of it as is practical, of course."  
  
"Now that.. I can provide," the young woman drawled with a smile. "So where's the rest of our team?"  
  
O'Neill produced two sets of folders and handed one to each of the two officers in front of him. "Murray's off-world right now with SG-3, and Russell arrives tomorrow night."  
  
He drew their attention first to Murray's folder. "2nd Lieutenant Orlando Murray, Marine Corps, heavy weapons and demolitions specialist. Also known as Ragin' Cajun, Cajun for short. Great guy as long as you're not on the wrong side of a gunfight with him."  
  
After that, Russell's folder. "2nd Lieutenant Valerie Russell, Air Force. Civilian interpreter at Aviano for the last couple years, finally joined the Air Force a few months ago. You're going to need someone to translate, and I figure it's best if your interpreter's already been through basic and weapons training. Any thoughts? Questions? Concerns?"  
  
Gardiner's brain went into neutral right then. "So... I get the runaway celebrity, the high-explosive nutcase, and someone just out of basic..." he started. Paisley shot him an annoyed look. "This could get interesting. Very interesting. And fun..." he finished lamely, his voice trailing off at the end.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2006  
1500 HOURS MAGT

Some of the best news stories break by chance - a reporter or photographer happening to be in the right place at the right time to witness history being made. History was hardly being made today, but Izvestia photographer Alexei Semyonovich Pimenov nevertheless kept that thought in mind as he approached the baggage claim at Khabarovsk Novy Airport. He was exhausted from the journey home from Komsomolsk, having dragged himself out of a cheap hotel bed at 4:00 in the morning only to sit in an airport terminal.  
  
He quickly found the carousel for his own flight, and was waiting for his suitcase when he was jostled from behind. He looked around and found himself face to face with a goateed Western-looking man. "Izvinite," the man said with a distinctly American accent before sidling away to join an increasingly large group of his countrymen at the next carousel, who had apparently just arrived from Seoul.  
  
Pimenov may have been tired, but he had enough of his wits about him to realize that something was not entirely normal. He'd never seen such a large gathering of Westerners, not here in Khabarovsk. Twenty of them, he counted, fifteen men and five women, in their twenties and thirties with the exception of a small teenage girl, and all quite athletic-looking. One man, wearing a dark suit and conversing animatedly with the goateed man who had bumped Pimenov earlier, stood out as a leader. Another, Pimenov realized, was someone whose name he should have recognized from his own stint in Africa - John Gardiner. Military advisors, he immediately guessed, but for whom and for what purpose? And why was John Gardiner here, when he was supposedly one of the leading experts on African politics? Could the Russian government possibly have interests in Africa? Why Khabarovsk, when the only military presence here was a single mechanized infantry division whose soldiers largely alternated between watching the Chinese border and playing cards? The questions raced as quickly as they could through his slowed mind. He reached for his camera bag, certain that the news office would be highly interested.  
  
After snapping a few photos, Pimenov gathered enough courage to step forward. "I could not help but notice your group," he said to the leader, in English. "We rarely see many Americans here."  
  
Now it was Phil Davenport's turn to think on his feet. Traveling by commercial airliner had been a ploy to avoid notice in a city where an irregular military flight might actually have drawn much more notice. But now that he had been noticed, by a man with a large camera bag, no less, the people behind him could hardly pass for tourists. Davenport decided to give him part of the truth, but only after checking his credentials.  
  
"You're very perceptive," he said. "Are you local?"  
  
"Yes, I am," Pimenov answered. He handed Davenport a business card. "Alexei Pimenov, Khabarovsk news bureau, Izvestia. I take it you are not here for pleasure?"  
  
"Got us nailed," Davenport said, carefully choosing his words. "Philip Davenport, Lieutenant Colonel, US Air Force. We're on special assignment. The Khabarovsk Stargate base is being shut down and dismantled in the next few weeks, so they sent us to watch over that and making sure it goes as per agreement."  
  
"Ah, I see." The Russian left his most pressing question unasked: why so many people? Twenty seemed like overkill for that kind of job. He decided, instead, to ask the Moscow office for the official press release on the operation.  
  
"So is Russian news so uninteresting that the papers are resorting to sending people after every group of foreigners that arrives at the airport?"  
  
"Not at all, Mr. Davenport. In fact, I am just returning from Komsomolsk myself."  
  
"So... why the pictures? Just in case?"  
  
"I had extra film. Why not?" Pimenov smiled weakly. Davenport looked unconvinced. "I must go pick up my luggage. Good day to you, and perhaps we will meet again." He wheeled around and walked off.


	7. Arrivals and Undercurrents

MONDAY, JUNE 5, 2006  
1400 HOURS  
  
Jack O'Neill scanned the rows of people in the SGC auditorium. They half-filled the seats in the room: in all, fifty men and women who would constitute twelve field teams.  
  
"Welcome back, everyone," he started. Each team had been training together for at least three weeks now, in various parts of the world. Five teams had just returned from Siberia; three from England; one each from Egypt and Mexico; and the last two from Quantico, Virginia. "Some of you have been with the Stargate program for a while, and some of you may have joined us only a few weeks ago. If you're new to the program, I'm going to assume you were fully briefed by Lt. Col. Carter or Dr. Jackson; if you've been here for some time you probably have a good idea of what you're going to be doing. Rumors just tend to spread quickly around here.  
  
"So... all of you in this room are here because you were selected to be part of what might be Earth's most ambitious project yet. You've been assigned to one of the eighteen field teams that will operate from Tau'ri Alpha, our first permanent off-world base. Congratulations - you're probably the only people crazy enough to accept this assignment. I'll let Lieutenant Colonel Carter tell you the rest. She's going to be the top science officer at Alpha."  
  
Samantha Carter stood up from her chair as the next slide, a star map, appeared on the screen. Pointing at the map, she identified both Earth's sun and the star system in which the new base was located. "Tau'ri Alpha is located much closer to the center of the Milky Way than Earth, so most Goa'uld sensor technology should have trouble picking up our location until they actually come within the planet's ionosphere. The planet's a bit bigger than Earth, but doesn't have as much iron in its core, so the ionosphere starts around 40,000 feet. That means, if they were to actually find the planet, they'd probably have to search for days. Speaking of days, they're about 21 hours long there. We're going to use Mountain time as a standard, but it'll probably be easier to operate on the local day-night cycle."  
  
The next slide was an aerial image of the valley, taken from a a Tok'ra tel'tac that had been borrowed for Tau'ri Alpha use. "The base is located in a mountain valley, around a large natural cavern that contains the Stargate itself. The cavern isn't visible in the picture, because of the gatehouse and medical facility" - Carter pointed at a building that seemed to grow out of a mountain slope - "that covers the entrance."  
  
"She could stop wasting our time and skip this," Martin Pasanen grumbled under his breath as Carter proceeded to point out building after building. "It's not as if we'll remember it all before the trip anyway." He looked to his left and right. None of his teammates were paying any attention whatsoever. Davenport was dozing off - no wonder he'd picked a spot near the back of the room. Hsu looked up occasionally, but his hands held a small padlock and some lockpicks, and he idly worked at the lock as Carter began rattling off technical specifications that, while impressive, were at best only tangentially relevant. Fletcher actually listened to the technical information for a while, but soon her eyes also began to wander as she fell into some daydream or another.  
  
Just as it seemed like there was going to be no end, General O'Neill stepped forward again. "Sorry, Carter, we don't have much time left," he apologized after cutting her off. He then addressed the Alpha teams: "Since you've been split into small groups so far, I'd just like to have each team stand up so we all have some idea of who's who. Let's start with Alpha One."  
  
Pasanen just managed to shake his commanding officer awake as O'Neill spoke those words, and the four came to their feet, about equally awkwardly.  
  
O'Neill continued. "Lieutenant Colonel Phil Davenport, Captain Martin Pasanen, Second Lieutenant Kat Fletcher, Doctor Kevin Hsu. And Carter, you owe me five bucks."  
  
Carter covered her eyes with one hand and shook her head.  
  
"So you seriously thought everyone would stay awake through that?" O'Neill asked rhetorically. He was answered by silence. "Oops. Was that on mike? Sorry. Alpha Two..."  
  
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2006  
1015 HOURS  
  
Just as suddenly as it appeared, the tunnel of light gave way. Kevin Hsu blinked several times as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was in a huge natural cavern brightly lit by fluorescent lights running across the ceiling. In front of him, Davenport and Pasanen were already chatting amiably with a pair of Marine officers. He stood and stared into space for a while. The engineers had done their job well; modern technology seemed to blend seamlessly into the rock walls and floor. There was a DHD in front of the Stargate itself, supplemented by communication equipment with tangled masses of wires running to the banks of computers near the far wall.  
  
A voice below him broke his reverie. "Eeps," Kat Fletcher said as she sat up on the floor, having apparently fallen flat on her face on the way out of the event horizon.  
  
"Eeps?" Hsu asked, perplexed by the expression.  
  
"Yeah, eeps," the girl said, her tone of voice trying to be matter-of-fact. But her eyes were wide. "That was amazing," she added, bouncing to her feet. "Can we do it again?"  
  
The boots of Maj. Patrick Lindsay of Alpha Two hit the ramp with a resounding thud. Responding only to the sound, Hsu and Fletcher stepped aside just in time to avoid the rest of that team - all the better because the other three members of Alpha Two were all new to the Stargate program. Lindsay barely managed to catch Ens. Beth Winstead as the Navy medic let out a short shriek of surprise; and Capt. Ryan Raybourne and Dr. Kirsten Weiss barely stayed on their feet. They were closely followed by Alpha Three. Although three of them had also never been through the Stargate, they had better luck. Maj. Andy Szeja, a veteran, had no problems at all. Capt. Dan O'Toole stumbled but was easily caught by Hsu and Raybourne, while the Special Forces training of 1st Lt. Jonathan McNamara and Ens. Alex King compensated for their inexperience in Gate travel as they easily kept their footing on the metal ramp.  
  
The junior of the two Marine officers, a black man with the name Davis on his uniform and a captain's bars on his shoulder, snapped into action, suddenly realizing that his job wasn't quite done, and three teams, not one, had just arrived. He stepped away from the conversation and toward the people milling about at the base of the ramp. "Please step aside, sirs," he said curtly, "Theah's half a dozen cahtloads of equipment right behind ya."  
  
"Hey, you from Boston?," O'Toole asked him as he went by.  
  
"Yeah," Davis answered. "Yourself?"  
  
"Lived there for a couple years," came the reply as O'Toole walked off.  
  
Hsu and Fletcher rejoined their teammates. "Good day, Lieutenant Fletcher, Doctor Hsu," said the tall Marine major who had stayed with Davenport and Pasanen. "I'm Jesse Krogstad. I'm in charge of security here. General O'Neill wanted to see you guys, he'll be down in a minute."  
  
"Thompson, I want each unit moved to the left wall when it comes through," Davis's voice came from behind them with a sense of finality.  
  
"Will do, sir," another voice responded.  
  
Hsu looked around to see him returning.  
  
"This is Kwame Davis, my number-two," Krogstad finished. "Anything security-related, look for one of us." Davis nodded.  
  
Just then, a familiar figure stepped out from among the banks of computers. "Good morning, campers!" General O'Neill greeted whichever of the new arrivals were still in the cave. "Enjoy the trip?"  
  
"Wasn't bad, seeing as we had so many first-timers," Davenport reported as O'Neill joined the group that was now approaching the exit. "No one's thrown up yet."  
  
Fletcher was more enthusiastic. "Best. Ride. Ever." It was obvious to all present that she was about to start bouncing again at any minute.  
  
"Glad you liked it," O'Neill said, spreading his arms wide. "Welcome to Tau'ri Alpha."  
  
The landscape stretched out before them, outside the double doors of the gatehouse. They stood outside for a few moments, admiring the view.  
  
"You sure know how to pick a place, sir," Davenport said. "Ever considered going into feng shui consulting? After you retire, of course?"  
  
"Feng shui? Since when did I strike you as a mystic?"  
  
"Since you started meditating in that room full of candles with Teal'c."  
  
O'Neill traced small circles in the air with an index finger as he tried to come up with a response. "I was getting in touch with my inner Jaffa!" he protested.  
  
All he got was a blank stare.  
  
"Alright, you win," O'Neill admitted. "But this one was all Jacob."  
  
"Great scenery, all the same," Davenport said. "My compliments to the Tok'ra. Hey, where's Fletcher?"  
  
Everyone looked down the slope. Kat Fletcher, having long since abandoned all military decorum, was splashing happily through the mountain stream below them.  
  
"I think she's got the right idea," Pasanen said. "We do have the rest of the month to move in, right?"  
  
Davenport stopped to consider the thought, then suddenly took off running. "Dibs on the boat!" he shouted behind him as he tore downhill.  
  
THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2006  
1200 HOURS PDT  
  
The letter on Marine Capt. Edward Blackburn's desk intrigued him. He was being asked, apparently, to join the Stargate program, as second-in-command of Alpha 15. Did that mean SG-15? What he knew of the SGC was only what had been openly published. He hadn't expected to ever need to know more. While being Vice-President Kinsey's nephew had its advantages, access to the SGC had never been one of them. It was all too well known that Hammond and Kinsey were not on the best of terms. That was an understatement, Blackburn thought as he unwrapped a sandwich. They flat-out loathed one another. It didn't matter that he and his uncle were not especially close. He had no doubt in his mind that, had Hammond realized that he was at all related to Kinsey, the letter would never have been written.  
  
In fact, Hammond knew already. But Blackburn's service record - a Purple Heart in the Gulf War, a Bronze Star for heroism in the second Iraqi war, and participation in at least half a dozen top secret operations around the globe - had been enough to at least suppress his doubts. There was also the matter of Blackburn not actually having applied for the position; he was simply one of the best soldiers in the Marine Corps, which was enough to draw the SGC's attention. Still, Hammond had warned O'Neill to watch the man carefully, and to report any signs of meddling on Kinsey's part.  
  
O'Neill, incidentally, was the subject of Blackburn's next thought. The two men had never met, but Blackburn certainly knew O'Neill's name from past campaigns. Jack O'Neill, from a distance, had always seemed both flippant and arrogant, which to Eddie Blackburn meant he needed to be taken down a notch. There was also the matter of that incident in Iraq... Jack O'Neill was going to be embarrassed, sooner or later. Blackburn intended to make sure of that.


	8. Night Before

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28, 2006  
1200 HOURS - EARLY EVENING

"Mmm, this is really good," Martin Pasanen said, gesturing at the trout on his plate. "How did you get this?"

"Oh, we manage," Kevin Hsu answered. "You can thank Abby for that."

Three inquisitive pairs of eyes turned in her direction. They were all in the Hsus' apartment; being a married couple, Kevin and Abby had a bit more space than most of the others at Tau'ri Alpha. They'd invited all of Alpha One to join them for a home-cooked dinner, along with Kevin's longtime friend, Dr. Marko Balasevic, now on Alpha Seven. For Davenport, Pasanen, and Balasevic, it was a welcome change from commissary food. For Fletcher, it was normal by now. She was allergic to wheat, and got headaches after eating too much soy; eggs and milk were only good if she stuck to the "organic" brands, as the chemicals and hormones in most commercial types could drive her to painful spasms. With her own health and sanity in mind, she avoided the commissary as much as she could, and she'd had dinner with the Hsus every day of the last week.

Abby Powers-Hsu grinned. "It's all Sergeant Davis back on Earth, actually. We got him to throw our groceries in with the supply shipment every week."

"My compliments to the che... the chevron guy," Davenport deadpanned, to the amusement of all.

Balasevic, himself a competent amateur chef, chewed thoughtfully, trying to identify the flavors and seasonings on the fish. "Hmm," he finally said. "What spices did you use?"

"Thyme, tarragon, and, uh, this herb that Kat and I found in the woods on the last combat exercise," Kevin Hsu said, taking a jar from the kitchen counter. He passed it to Balasevic. It contained several sprigs of a dark green plant that didn't look like any familiar Earth herb. The Croatian physicist pulled one out and examined it, sniffing at it thoughtfully.

"Actually more like had our faces shoved into it," Kat added bluntly. "Mike Quisenberry's pretty heavy-handed about getting people under cover." Pasanen nodded in sympathy as Hsu grimaced. The Marine from Alpha 5, another SGC veteran, thoroughly deserved the nickname of "Sledgehammer Man" that his teammates had bestowed upon him.

"Do we know it's safe?" Davenport asked in a moment of uncharacteristic caution. "I thought the medical staff was against eating the local plant life."

"I _am_ medical staff," Abby replied without hesitation.

"So that's how it is... monopolizing the supply, I take it?" Davenport winked at her.

"Not really, we just thought we'd get a head start on publishing the first interplanetary cookbook," Kevin quipped.

"Try the greens, they're local too," Fletcher piped up cheerfully, jabbing a fork into said greens. "And fresh. I cut them myself, a couple hours ago." Even cooked down, they were recognizable as one of the small shrubs that grew all around the edge of the forest.

"So that's why you were in such a hurry to leave the shooting range. Didn't seem like you," Davenport observed. He'd run into her in the afternoon at the shooting range, where she'd been known to spend three or four hours at a stretch. Today, she had fired only about a dozen shots before leaving.

"Actually, I was quite done there." Fletcher shoved her fork into a pile of food, as if for emphasis. Her CO didn't doubt it at all. He'd looked at her scores a few times, and on a good day her pistol shooting was better than anything he'd seen outside the Olympic Games.

"You know, I haven't ever seen you shoot a P90 on the range... adapting OK to that?" Davenport was well aware that few regular units used the P90, and had been fully prepared to give Fletcher a few weeks to get accustomed to her new weapon.

"A-a P90? I'm, uh, working on it."

"If you need any help, come talk to me, okay?"

"Sure." Fletcher nodded, and left the question at that.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, the topic of conversation had shifted. Balasevic was indulging yet another of his intellectual hobbies: written language. The latest sample had come from Dr. Julio Lopez, the young hotshot linguist on the new SG-1 team, on a reconnaisance mission to a Goa'uld-occupied world. Inscriptions there used an alphabet that none of the team had seen - which turned out to be a syllabary invented in Surinam in the 20th century.

Even though Kevin Hsu's work now involved linguistics, he knew he could get around the no-work rule by claiming that this project wasn't his. Besides, the whole point of that had been to keep himself and Abby, both physicians by trade, from spending too much time talking about medicine. Before joining the Stargate program, Kevin's involvement in linguistics had been purely amateur, and Abby had been at least somewhat interested, so... why not?

"Most of the inscriptions seemed to easily predate the Ndjuka script on Earth," Hsu said. "And if the locals are descended from Zulus... Surinam's nowhere near Zululand."

Balasevic considered the problem carefully. "Ah, but it makes perfect sense," he replied after a while. "Atumisi claimed divine inspiration, which conveniently solves that problem. Almost too conveniently, though."

"Any chance of talking to Julio tonight?" Hsu asked.

"I don't think so, SG-1 is still off-world."

"They've been out for more than a week!"

"Ferretti's always been like that," Davenport interjected. "Gotta hand it to him. I don't know how he keeps his teams in the field for so long. Goes off on a recon, and comes back in two weeks with enough intel to fill the Encyclopedia Britannica."

"When are they due in?"

"Late tonight, I think. SGC time. Right about when we get up in the morning here."

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28, 2006  
1700 HOURS - AFTER MIDNIGHT

Phil Davenport whistled softly as he ambled along the path to the lake. Things were falling into place at last. The iris was about to arrive, meaning the base would soon be fully operational. It was about time. Already, his team had already made half a dozen trips through the Stargate to friendly worlds, where they had trained with the Tok'ra, the Free Jaffa, and units of the Kelownan military. But Davenport was bored now - he and Pasanen had been around the Stargate program forever and a half, and dealing with all the new allies was old hat to them.

And yet somehow he had a nagging feeling that his team wasn't entirely ready. He knew Pasanen well enough, but the sniper was still having trouble adjusting to the 21-hour day. Hsu had still never been under fire before. And Fletcher... something was wrong with her. She seemed high-strung lately, almost constantly afraid she'd make a mistake.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of gunshots, one after another. Startled for a moment, he quickly pulled himself back together. The reports were coming from the direction of the shooting range. Perhaps whoever was training there might be worth talking to.

It was Fletcher. She was standing at the far side of the darkened room, firing round after round at the targets from what turned out to be a P90. On the floor, at her feet, was a ten-pound dumbell. Davenport stepped quietly toward her and placed himself where he could see both Fletcher and the targets. Not entirely surprisingly, she was doing extremely badly.

"Fletcher?" he said softly as she paused to reload.

The girl literally jumped as she looked around and saw him in the room. "S.. sir," she stammered. "Wh-what are you doing here?"

"I was going to ask you the same question," Davenport answered matter-of-factly. "It's not that often that one runs into someone, well, shooting in the dark."

"It's more realistic, sir," Fletcher explained, wanting to believe that was the only reason but knowing full well that it wasn't.

Davenport walked over to at the lieutenant. She was wearing a tank top, which revealed big, ugly bruises on her right shoulder. "How long have you been here anyway?"

"About three hours, including the weight room." Fletcher chambered a round, took aim, and fired. She winced visibly as her weapon's recoil drove the stock into her bruised shoulder.

"There is such a thing as overtraining, you know..." Davenport started.

Fletcher fired another round. Her shoulder throbbed with pain. "I don't have much of a choice, do I?" she said through gritted teeth.

What she meant by that, Davenport could only guess. He guessed. "I never said you had to use the P90, just that it's standard for SG teams."

"Why all the nagging about it then?" The lieutenant looked annoyed, but also a bit relieved. She aimed downrange again, but hesitated there, her finger still on the trigger. Davenport let a slight frown break his poker face. Fletcher's shooting posture and grip on her gun were terrible. Whether it was usual, or a result of her exhaustion and bruises, he couldn't tell.

"You never said anything about having problems."

"And what, exactly, do you mean by problems?"

"Why the hell else would you be here for four hours straight late at night? If it's for your health, I want a word with the doctor that prescribed it."

So much for that try, Fletcher thought. It had been a flimsy excuse from the start, of course. "Fine, fine," she finally said, exasperated. "I can't hold this thing steady, it's just too short to brace like a rifle and I don't have the muscles to shoot freehand."

Davenport was taken aback. It wasn't that she'd edged her way into this assignment without many of the abilities that most soldiers took for granted. He'd known from the first day that he probably couldn't ever expect much physical strength from Fletcher. Her previous unit, a Reserve engineer battalion, had rarely carried rifles, let alone fired them, which was probably the only reason she'd managed to stay in it for so long. She'd even admitted that she probably wouldn't pass a standard fitness test right now. But then he really couldn't fault her for lack of effort - she practically lived in the gym, the poor girl, and ate something like five solid meals a day, but she never gained any weight, and it was increasingly clear that she was never going to look anything other than small and fragile. Fletcher obviously wasn't here because of her combat ability, her Bronze Star notwithstanding.

Fletcher continued, "I'm sorry, maybe if I trained more..."

"You're already overtraining."

"B-but..." The young lieutenant looked on the verge of tears. Davenport knelt beside her and started to put an arm around her. She shook him off, and her voice hardened. "Don't patronize me," she said angrily. "If I'm not good enough, just tell me right now. It won't be the first time I've heard it."

Davenport bit his lip. "Lieutenant, I know you were Reserve and all, but you don't have to prove yourself. I've seen your pistol scores, and the only one who's better... is Pasanen. If you'd just asked me if you could carry sidearms only, I would have said yes. I still think you can learn the P90, but we'll have to work on your mechanics some time. Just not tonight. Having you injured before our first mission isn't exactly about to help us."

"So why were you getting on me earlier tonight?"

Davenport sighed. "I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I guess I shouldn't have asked in front of everyone. I just wanted a clear picture of where we all stood. We're operational as soon as the last iris parts get in, you know. And that's tomorrow assuming nothing goes wrong." He went into a back room and returned with a bag of ice. Without a further word he pressed it to Fletcher's shoulder. She tried at first to push him away, but only halfheartedly. "No more shooting tonight, and that's an order," he said firmly. "And go see a doctor in the morning."


	9. Unexpected Guests

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0100 HOURS - MIDMORNING

"You've got to start taking better care of yourself," Dr. Powers-Hsu said, frowning at Fletcher's bruises. Even eight hours after Davenport had ordered her off the shooting range, the pale skin of her shoulder and upper arm was covered with angry black and blue splotches.

"Yes, Mother," the teenager answered flippantly, steeling herself for the expected lecture on pain and not pushing oneself too far. She'd heard that one quite a few times before, from at least half a dozen different people, and fully expected to hear it again.

The doctor surprised her, though. "Kat," she said quietly, "did I ever tell you how much you reminded me of myself?"

"What do you mean?"

"I used to be obsessive about practicing things when I was a kid. Mostly playing the cello, and rifle shooting."

Fletcher blinked. "Rifle shooting?" Abby Powers-Hsu had, up until now, shown few signs of interest in guns.

"Yeah, rifle shooting." The doctor smiled. "I grew up in a little town in Alaska, right around the Arctic Circle. Most people that far north get some part of their food by hunting. They even teach traditional Inuit hunting techniques in school."

"Ah, that would do it. Not that much different from where I grew up, I guess." Fletcher didn't have to ask to know that Dr. Powers-Hsu was at least part-Inuit herself. She'd noticed some distinctly Native American facial features the first time they'd met, and had even meant to directly ask what tribe at some point.

But now it was Abby's turn to be surprised. She'd suspected that the young lieutenant had had similar experiences, but wondered just how close they'd turn out to be.

"Small-town New Mexico," the girl continued. "My parents were gun nuts, and when we moved there we ended up living in a little trailer in the desert about five miles out of town, where they could shoot all they wanted and just walk a couple miles away from the road if they felt like hunting."

"New Mexico," Dr. Powers-Hsu mused, pressing an ice pack to Fletcher's arm. "Mmm, wouldn't have guessed." Fletcher already came in with sunburns often enough here; her fair complexion would offer almost no protection against a blazing desert sun.

"Yeah, you wouldn't believe how fast I went through sunscreen."

"So... what I was going to say was I learned the hard way. I know you want to be as good at everything as you can be..."

Fletcher bit her lip and said nothing. It was coming now.

"...and that you'd rather not look incompetent in front of other people."

Now that was an odd twist. Fletcher sat up and listened.

"But you really should think about asking for help at some point. Pain doesn't only mean you're pushing yourself too hard. Sometimes it also means you're doing something wrong."

That was true. Hadn't Davenport said something last night about mechanics?

The doctor continued. "I always wanted to go out hunting with the boys when I was a kid, but I thought I'd just get laughed at if I couldn't do it as well as they did, so I practiced secretly in the yard. I actually used to get the same bruises from it."

"Oh, really? What happened then?"

"Dad found me. You wouldn't believe how scared I was when I suddenly heard his voice two feet behind me."

Talk about coincidences. Fletcher couldn't stifle a giggle.

"He showed me exactly where my mechanics were off. It was embarrassing, and pretty simple. On top of that, I got the whole lecture on how dangerous it was to sneak out alone."

"Awww, that's no fun..."

"He was pretty cool about it, though. No need to sneak out in the first place, he said, he would have taught me everything if I'd just asked. I even got my own rifle on my next birthday."

"Sweet."

"So... well... Phil came by about an hour ago and told me the whole story. I think I convinced him not to blab about it all over base. Meanwhile, if you're not comfortable with other people watching you practice, I suppose I could go over to the range with you tonight? Just let me know."

"Thanks, I think I'll take you up on that offer." That was unexpected. Fletcher left the infirmary much happier.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0300 HOURS - NOON

Phil Davenport and Martin Personen had their lunch in the commissary rudely interrupted by klaxons and flashing red lights.

"Incoming spacecraft," a voice announced. "Air defense personnel to stations."

"Incoming spacecraft?" Davenport asked no one in particular. "What the hell?" Leaving his half-eaten plate of food on the table, he scrambled out of the room after a group of airmen. Pasanen twirled his fork experimentally, took one last bite of pasta, and followed.

When they stepped outside, it was immediately obvious what was the matter. A Goa'uld tel'tac had just decloaked almost directly above the base, and was descending rapidly. A dozen missile turrets had already swiveled around to point at it, but it showed no sign of slowing down.

"Colonel Davenport!" a SF shouted as he saw the leader of Alpha One. "The General wants you in the command center!"

"One second," Davenport replied. He turned to Pasanen. "You're in charge here. Get some people to the tarmac, that's where they'll try to ring down." Already the tel'tac's descent was beginning to slow. As soon as Pasanen nodded his understanding, Davenport took off for the gatehouse at an all-out sprint.

He arrived in the cave to find it buzzing with activity, and stopped at the entrance, scanning the room for O'Neill's face. "Hey, Phil! Over here!" a female voice called from among the computer terminals. He looked in the direction of the voice and saw both O'Neill and Carter waving to try and get his attention. They were sitting at a communications console with Krogstad and Szeja.

Carter brought him up to date on what was happening. "We've been tracking them inbound for the last hour and a half," she said. "They're not responding to hails on any frequency, in English, Latin, Goa'uld, or Asgard."

"It's one tel'tac," Davenport said. "I have a feeling it's not the System Lords."

"Same here," Carter agreed, "but we can't take any chances." She switched on her microphone. "Acquire target," she ordered.

She was answered by a cascade of acknowledgements from each missile and gun emplacement. If the crew of the ship tried anything hostile, it would be blown to pieces in moments. But the tel'tac continued hovering, seemingly unaware that anything was happening below.

Meanwhile, on the tarmac, Pasanen found that the situation was already well in hand, as Davis had beaten him to the punch. A welcoming committee was already there, with a hodgepodge of firearms pointed in the approximate direction of the tel'tac. A fully-armed base security fireteam was augmented by people from everywhere. The blond head of Mike Quisenberry rose high above those around him; John Gardiner squinted at the spacecraft, the glare of the sun reflected from his glasses; even Abby Powers-Hsu, the doctor, was now running toward them from the infirmary with what looked like an old hunting rifle. Funny, he'd never have taken her for the gun nut type...

"That's gotta be the dumbest goddamn snakehead ever," muttered Capt. Viet Nguyen of Alpha 7, who had been nearby when the tel'tac arrived and was now aiming his pistol at the spot where someone would almost certainly ring down. "There's no way they don't see us down here, and they're not even moving."

The tel'tac began to descend again, slowly and with only the faintest whirr of its engines. More than two dozen pairs of hands gripped their weapons more tightly. It was now inside the range of the anti-aircraft guns that served as the base's secondary line of defense, and those guns were now trained on it from all sides. Suddenly, the tel'tac's cargo door began to slide open.

The radio crackled in the command center. "He's opening his cahgo hold," Kwame Davis' voice came over the air, Boston accent and all.

"Funny, never seen a snakehead do that," O'Neill answered quickly. "Hold fire for now, but use your best judgment."

"Yessir!"

The tension was palpable as people all over the base began to wonder what was about to happen.

Suddenly, O'Neill's radio crackled again. "White flag in the doorway, sir. It's... it's Daniel Jackson!"


	10. An Unenviable Assignment

Author's note: no, this story isn't abandoned! I hit the thick of the med school interview season shortly after posting the last chapter, with travel snafus making it a lot busier than it should have been, and then when I had time to write it took me a while to get all my plot lines straightened out. So here we go again!

Author's note #2: I've been toying with the idea of inserting a "character bios" chapter, perhaps as an appendix. Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know what you think.

* * *

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0400 HOURS - EARLY AFTERNOON 

Daniel Jackson wasn't the only surprise visitor. When the tel'tac touched down on the tarmac, Jackson was followed out of the spacecraft by Jacob Carter and Teal'c.

"Just like old times," O'Neill mused as the recent arrivals were ushered into the briefing room, where Carter and Davenport were waiting. They were no longer SG-1 - that honor now belonged to Ferretti's team - but they were all together for the first time in months. But it was not a happy meeting. The sudden and unexpected arrival of old friends, at this time, could only mean something was amiss. Everyone knew it, O'Neill thought. It was painfully evident from the worried expressions etched on the faces around the room. Even Carter, talking in the corner with her father, didn't look quite as overjoyed to see him as usual.

"So, Space Monkey," he finally started, feigning nonchalance. Very transparently, of course. Jackson would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb, and then some, not to see through that act. "What brings you to this neck of the galactic woods?"

"Jack... we've got a problem."

"I take it Houston couldn't help much?"

"Actually, I'd say Houston, or the Tok'ra equivalent of it, was the only chance we had."

"OK, bad joke."

"The Stargate on Earth is locked up. We can't use it."

The silence that followed was deafening.

Jackson continued. "Someone dialed us, and won't let go. Nothing's coming through the Gate, but every thirty-eight minutes, as soon as it shuts down, whoever it is just dials in again faster than we can dial out."

Jacob Carter lowered his head, and his eyes flashed. "We have reason to believe," Selmak added, "that a System Lord is temporarily sacrificing a Stargate in order to deny the Tau'ri access to the entire system."

"So that explains the whole mess with the tel'tac," Sam Carter said, "but why weren't you guys answering us?"

"We went for an emergency measure to get here as fast as we could," Jacob explained. "We just added a naquadria booster to the tel'tac, and we had to jettison it as soon as we got into this system, since it was about to explode. We managed to put a hundred and eighty kilometers between us and the booster, but the EMP pulse still knocked out all our comms arrays."

Meanwhile, O'Neill's face wore an incredulous expression. "Nothing at all coming through?" he asked Jackson, not quite believing his ears.

"That's the really funny thing," Jackson said. "When we left Earth about, uh," - he looked at his watch - "sixteen hours ago, they'd had the Gate running for more than nine hours straight, about fourteen redials... and nothing actually came through it. No attack, no demands, no threats, no attempt whatsoever at communication."

"Let's take this one step at a time," O'Neill said levelly. "Why would they do that? What do they stand to gain by cutting us off temporarily?"

"They prevent us from leaving Earth... and they also do not allow others to contact Earth," Teal'c suggested. "I believe you call it killing two birds with one stone."

"Trying to keep us from finishing Alpha Base?" Davenport inquired.

"I'd be surprised if they even knew about Alpha Base," Carter said.

"Our allies!" Jackson suddenly exclaimed.

"Indeed," said Teal'c. "But we need not even consider that much, DanielJackson. Our personnel who are off-world are now unable to return."

"So... were any teams due back in the last twenty-five hours?" O'Neill asked.

Jackson answered his question. "No, but we have six teams off-world right now, and three due within the next few hours."

"And if for some reason they need to get out of wherever they are," Davenport finished for him, "they can't go home, so they have to come here.

"I don't like this," O'Neill said. "We don't even have an iris. The machine shop's still waiting for some parts from Earth. As soon as we dial anywhere with Goa'uld forces in sight, they'll know exactly what address we're dialing from, and there goes our cover."

"Do you have another option, General O'Neill?" Teal'c asked pointedly, raising an eyebrow.

O'Neill looked at each person in the room in turn, and his eyes were met by stony faces.

Davenport was the only exception. "P3Y-495 would make a pretty good staging area," he mused aloud.

"Wait a minute, doesn't Kali still own that planet?" O'Neill couldn't believe it. He was expecting to hear something outrageous, but suicidal went a little beyond that category as far as he was concerned.

"As of SG-7's report last week, the base there is still crippled from the beating we handed out back in March," Davenport answered smugly. "And man, did we ever smash up the place."

"That's pretty accurate, I'd say," Jacob confirmed. "Kali's being pushed by both Nirrti and the Free Jaffa right now, and probably can't spare the resources to repair a minor outpost like that one for a while."

"We could kill two birds with one stone." Davenport pressed his advantage to the fullest. "Pick up all our off-world teams, and finish off that base while we're at it."

It was a tough call, O'Neill thought. There was a target of opportunity in front of them that seemed easy enough to take, but he had to weigh that against the possibility of opening his own base to retaliation before it had a workable means of defense.

Carter, meanwhile, came out adamantly against the plan. "I don't doubt we could take them," she explained, "but the chance of one of the enemy learning our location and reporting it is just too high. It just takes one."

"Got any others ideas, then?" Davenport challenged her.

"Sir, if I may," a voice piped up from near the door. Kat Fletcher stepped forward, a laptop computer under her arm, suddenly defusing what might have become a very heated argument. O'Neill wondered how she'd gotten into the room without him or anyone else noticing. Probably slipped by everyone in the heat of the discussion, he thought. Still, the lieutenant hadn't even been told that this meeting was even going on.

Fletcher slid the computer onto the table and popped it open. "We've had quite a bit of spare time in the last few weeks," she said, "so I started working on some stuff for what-if scenarios. I thought this one" - she pulled up some code in a text editor - "might apply here."

Carter stared intently at the code. "Origin-spoofing?" she asked cautiously. She wasn't sure. "Weird approach though, are you sure it works?"

Fletcher glanced around the room to see if anyone caught the exchange. "It's really blatantly kludged, so no, I'm not sure at all," she said, hardly raising anyone's level of comprehension or confidence. "I heard you know how to interface with the DHD?"

Carter nodded uncertainly. "I should be able to do it with this. Let me just get straight exactly what you're doing." She stared at the code, while people around her held their breaths. "You're bouncing everything through a third coordinate, which the computer should send to the DHD?"

Fletcher nodded.

"Okay, I'll give it a try." Carter's voice still sounded worried, but a bit more confident than before. "A couple hours, I think."

The general's indecision left him after hearing what was close enough to a vote of confidence from Carter. "Okay, first things first. Let's get as many teams in the cave as we have ready to go. We need people to contact any of our friends that don't have radio, evacuate anyone who needs to be evacuated. I'm also overriding SGC off-world orders effective immediately, and recalling all teams to Alpha Base if practical. Who's off-world right now?"

Jackson consulted his notes. "SG-1, 5, 11, 16, and 17 on standard recon missions, SG-8 on archaeological field assignment," he summarized. "Nothing out of the routine."

"In that case, I want all twelve of our teams ready to go the minute we've confirmed the spoofing program works."

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
1500 HOURS MSK

On Earth, news traveled fast. With the existence of the Stargate program now public knowledge, the closing of the Stargate was on television news within hours after Baal's first attempt to dial in. In the new Russia, where independent news outlets trying to scoop one another routinely speculated on events days in advance, conspiracy theories abounded. It was obvious, many pundits claimed. Russia had been excluded from the new Alpha Base, and now the Americans were keeping the Stargate at the SGC blocked, so that they again had a monopoly on the exploration of the galaxy.

By midafternoon on the 29th, Earth's Stargate having been unusable for more than twenty-four hours, even the major news outlets had picked up on the conspiracy theories. They couldn'tt possibly have known that, an hour earlier, all twelve Alpha teams had been called to emergency duty. Perhaps it didn't matter to some - even the modern-day incarnations of Pravda and Izvestia were often guilty of sensationalism in the name of the almighty dollar.

At this very moment, in fact, the wheels in Igor Arkadyavich Komarinsky's head were turning. On the desk in his Moscow office were a set of pictures taken by a photographer named Pimenov in the Khabarovsk airport. Pimenov had filed them away as unusable at the time after it became clear that no story was breaking. How wrong that prognosis was: months later, those same photographs were now of extreme interest to none other than the managing director of Izvestia.

On the screen of Komarinsky's laptop computer, meanwhile, was another set of photos: video captures from the CNN coverage of the first group departing for the Alpha Base. What made both sets of pictures interesting was the people in them. The same man who seemed to be in charge at the airport in Siberia had also led the first group through the Gate a month later. The rest of his four-person team appeared in both places as well. There was the thin man with the goatee, looking for all the world like a ridiculously stereotypical young American intellectual; the tiny, perpetually nervous-looking strawberry blonde; the broad-shouldered Asian. The leader of the next team, with his long nose and red hair, was likewise unmistakable, and so on.

Someone in Russia had been involved in establishing the Americans' new off-world facility, and now that the Americans' intentions were clear, there just might be a juicy exposé to write. In the old days this kind of journalism would not have been tolerated, but today the Soviet Union was long dead.

Heads would roll, Komarinsky thought as he picked up his telephone receiver and speed-dialed his news bureau in Washington. He intended to be the first to any story that might develop.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0730 HOURS - EARLY EVENING

"Whatever she's got up her sleeve, she's definitely taking her time with it."

"Always the pessimist, Martin. At this rate, you're gonna have a nervous breakdown before Fletcher does," Phil Davenport replied casually, leaning back and propping his feet up on the table. "Anyway, there isn't much we can do but wait."

They were in the smaller of the base's two briefing rooms, all the maps that Jackson and Gen. Carter had been able to dig up from the SGC archives now spread across the table in front of them, along with two half-eaten sandwiches on paper plates. An hour and a half earlier, an airman had tracked down each member of Alpha One, informing them that they would be the ones to take on any kind of rescue mission. Jackson had dug out a local map for every planet that a team was on, perhaps one of the most impressive excavations he had managed in his career.

Pasanen coughed impatiently. "Sure, she's a smart kid and all, but I still sometimes wonder why she has to have so many problems. She just always looks like a train wreck waiting to happen."

For a moment, all that could be heard was the sound of rain pounding on the roof. Autumn had descended quickly in the last two weeks, and the sudden rainstorm arrived just in time to accentuate the building tension in the air.

So many long stories start on dark and stormy nights, Davenport thought, wondering where this night would lead them.

"Of course it could always be worse," Pasanen added, as Davenport's silence began to grate at his nerves.

"Don't tell me," Davenport said unexpectedly. "Alpha Six. Not that I deal in rumors, but I'm sort of glad I'm not in John's shoes."

Six's linguist, 2nd Lt. Valerie Russell, was a character, to put it mildly. Something about her was off-putting. Like anyone else on the base, her competence was unquestionable; she'd received consistently strong performance reviews as an interpreter in Italy, and she was adapting well to documents and voice recordings in all kinds of alien languages. But she was vegan - sometimes seen in today's military, but only rarely - and the door to her quarters was completely covered with "LaRouche for President" flyers, openly flouting military regulations. No one was sure whether she was joking or serious.

"You do realize, don't you, that Six is the other team on alert for rescue missions?" Pasanen remarked.

"Eh. What are the chances, anyway?"

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0800 HOURS - EVENING

"No worky." Fletcher sighed as the Stargate sputtered and died for what must have been about the thirtieth straight time. "Try ten-bit with redundancy?" She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cave, wires all around her, a laptop computer precariously balanced on her left knee and a mug of hot coffee dangerously close to her foot.

"That's really not the problem."

"Look, we're trying to talk to an alien device through a... a regular serial cable! Haven't we at least considered the possibility that we're doing something wrong there?"

"It's not the interface," Carter answered, exasperated, poking at the DHD's innards with a screwdriver. "We've been using the same protocol for ten years, it hasn't changed."

"Butbutbut... the, the DHD's internal timer thingie won't cooperate!"

"Wait a minute. You're telling me you were trying to time the pulse with the main control crystal? No wonder it's aborting the dial sequence. What's wrong with using the computer's clock, anyway?"

"Um... oops?" Fletcher's fingers flew across the keyboard for a few minutes before she looked up. "Thanks, I kinda forgot about the obvious. Try it now?"

For once, the dialing sequence didn't stop at the sixth chevron. The seventh chevron dialed and... nothing happened. A faint electrical hum could be heard coming from the Gate, but that was all. No wormhole, no event horizon... "Here we go again," Fletcher muttered, taking a big gulp of coffee and scrolling up and down through her code trying to find an error in it.

WHOOOSH!

The wormhole exploded into existence.

Fletcher looked up, and laughed.

"Did you just do that?" Carter asked, amazed.

"No, did you? Oh, it doesn't matter, we're in business!" Still laughing aloud, Fletcher packed up her computer. In moments, she was gone, spreading the news.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
0930 HOURS - EVENING

The only MALP that had been delivered to Alpha Base so far was still in the shop waiting for new sensor arrays. It took some some prodding by Alpha One, but the crew chief was persuaded to hand over the rover with only the basic camera and microphone assembly attached to it.

That was enough to prove that the spoofing protocol worked, at least. By now, technicians had wired the DHD to the base computers, forming a more permanent and reliable control system than Fletcher's laptop. The MALP went through the wormhole, came out on the other side, and sent back pictures of the local DHD that showed a wormhole coming from the third location they had set. Fletcher had also found, after a few more tests, that there would always be a thirty-second delay between the seventh chevron and the establishment of a stable wormhole - apparently the formation of a stable double wormhole required a higher energy level. There were a few minor differences from ordinary dialing, and one major change: the double wormhole could only be maintained for just under four minutes, a tenth of what could be done under ordinary conditions.

With the proof of the concept visible to all, the next hour quickly became a blur of activity. With all twelve Alpha teams ready to go, O'Neill outlined his plan of action. First, they would make radio contact with the SG teams in the field, directing them to return to Alpha Base instead of Earth, and check on the status of any allies that had radio technology. The other allies would be contacted by sending teams through to check on them.

"Alpha 2, 8, and 11, get ready to move out to P3C-448," O'Neill ordered, directing two search & rescue teams and a Marine combat squad toward the cave. "We're using it as the third Gate, but if anyone has to come in hot, we're sending them your way. We can't afford to let the enemy see you dialing us. All other teams, stand by."

Most of the recalls went smoothly. The wormhole was opened, a radio message was sent through, and one by one the SG teams filed back. The precaution of using the third planet to cover emergencies turned out to be unnecessary. Kelowna, once contacted, had chipped in and augmented the Alpha teams at the emergency site with a rifle squad and a medical team, but for the first half-hour none of the SG teams were under fire, and none of the human communities that Earth counted among its friends needed to be evacuated. It almost seemed like a false alarm - except that Earth was still locked out.

O'Neill couldn't help but reflect on how long he'd been in the business as he saw the faces passing by him in both directions. Even if he knew they were in the Stargate program, he couldn't help his surprise at seeing people there who had been completely out of the loop just a few short years ago. Teal'c warmly greeted the Jaffa Rak'nor, now second-in-command of SG-16, when that team was the first to walk down the ramp from the Stargate. Robert Burke, the former CIA man who had been with him in the jungles of Honduras, unexpectedly came with SG-11. O'Neill fought the impulse to jump up from his seat and blurt out "What are you doing here?" Instead, he settled for a handshake and a pat on the shoulder. They could swap stories later. Alpha 9 departed for K'Tau with another face from the past among its number: 2nd Lt. Allison Fenwick, a tall, spirited young woman fresh out of the Air Force Academy, perhaps not all that different from the saucy thirteen-year-old who had stood up to Maybourne to protect Teal'c on the streets of Colorado Springs.

And then, going down the list of off-world teams, they reached SG-1.

"Daniel? Teal'c? Something isn't right here," Carter suddenly said.

"Uh-what?" Jackson asked, his head whipping around.

"Where did you say the blocking wormhole was coming from?"

Jackson scribbled some glyphs on a piece of paper and handed it over.

"No, this can't be right."

Everyone was looking at her now.

"The addresses are different, but the computer says they're the same place in space. I've never seen redundant coordinates like this before, not even with the two Gates on Earth. Normally only one set works."

"That's strange," Jackson agreed. "Try them both, to be sure?"

"Fire it up," O'Neill ordered.

On that cue, the technician at what was now the dialing terminal punched in the glyphs that had appeared on Earth's own Stargate when it had been blocked. The wormhole never formed.

"The other one now," Carter calmly instructed the technician. There was the now-familiar delay... and WHOOOOSH!

SG-1 was investigating a large base supposedly abandoned after the fall of Anubis, and left apparently untouched for the last two years. When they had first arrived on the planet, they had encountered no Goa'uld forces, and started to slowly explore and map the complex. O'Neill fully expected another routine withdrawal.

"SG-1, this is Alpha Base, do you read me?" he intoned into his microphone.

Static crackled on the radio set, breaking up Louis Ferretti's voice. "... Base, this is Ferretti, good to ... from ... over."

"SG-1, what's your status, over?"

More static.

"Louie, what's your status?" O'Neill repeated. "Can you reach the Gate?"

"Negative," Ferretti answered. "Baal's forces are ... got here two days ago. They've ... us, I repeat... they know we're here."

"Can you reach the Gate?" O'Neill asked again.

"Ne... safe for now but ... place is ... with Jaffa, we need backup!"

The signal faded and died.

O'Neill swiveled his chair around to face Phil Davenport and his team. "Congratulations, boys and girls," he announced. "You've just been given a hell of a first mission."


	11. In the Dark

Author's note: I'm going to try for at least one more update before I start medical school (that's three weeks from now). After that, well, you've probably heard horror stories about how busy med students get. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to write, it'll just depend on how much spare time I can find...

* * *

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
1030 HOURS - LATE EVENING 

"Alpha One and Alpha Six, you have a go. Good luck."

A bead of perspiration rolled along the general's brow. O'Neill himself had gone through the Stargate on combat missions before, but this was the first time he had ever sent others into unknown territory from the relative safety of his own base. He still wished he could be out in front - not so much for the action, which he knew had taken its toll on his body over the years, but out of concern for the people he was putting in harm's way. His hand involuntarily went to his left leg, still wearing a steel-frame knee brace four months after his ACL went out on this same planet. As the members of the former SG-1 knew from their years together, he would have sacrificed himself to save anyone under his command, but from now on that would no longer even be an option.

Preparations for this rescue mission were rushed, after O'Neill had made the crucial error of sending the MALP to scout ahead. While it made sense in principle, the rookie commander, along with everyone around him, had forgotten about the possibility of enemy forces being immediately on the other side. Alpha Base's only MALP had lasted just long enough to transmit a few frames of video before succumbing to a volley of staff weapon fire.

As ranking officer on the mission, Phil Davenport directed the assault. He brought both teams to a halt at the foot of the ramp, just long enough to give John Gardiner some last-minute instructions and run a final equipment check.

The armaments the two teams carried were fairly standard. Davenport himself carried the standard P90 submachine gun as his main firearm, as did most of the others. The exceptions were Pasanen's Heckler & Koch MSG-90 sniper rifle; Fletcher's heavily modified FN Five-Seven pistol; and Murray's ugly-but-effective M249 Para machine gun. Each was also equipped with a Zat gun. Distributed among the soldiers were several C4 charges and detonators, just in case they were needed. On the logistical side, they were traveling heavily loaded; not knowing what kind of dangers they might face, Gardiner had insisted that each person bring a full medical kit, rations for a full week, and ammunition to last almost as long.

Davenport was satisfied enough. He glanced over the faces of his comrades again. Even Kat Fletcher and Valerie Russell, the two women he had harbored serious doubts about, showed nothing but quiet confidence in their demeanors. If the truth were any different, he'd know soon enough. "Let's roll," he said, and both teams sprang into action.

They'd practiced their procedure for going in hot many times, even using the Stargate and traveling to uninhabited planets to include the full experience of wormhole travel in their training. A pair of flash-bang grenades went through first, followed two seconds later by a pair of fragmentation grenades. After that, on the count of five, Alpha One and Alpha Six charged up the ramp, the leader of each team firing several three-round bursts even before hitting the event horizon. Once through, the first two members of each team rolled to the side and opened up on the remaining Jaffa guards, Davenport and Fletcher going to the left while Gardiner and Murray took up positions on the right side of the ring. The remaining four each dropped to one knee and took aim at one of the last few moving targets. It was all over in seconds. In all, ten Jaffa lay dead around the Stargate, half of them felled by the grenades and early gunfire before anyone had passed through the Stargate.

The Stargate was located at the floor of a dry gorge, a dusty path in front of it and a pile of rubble marking a collapsed cavern entrance behind it. Smoke and dust hung in the air, obscuring anything beyond the immediate vicinity. Weeks of training as a unit kicked in, making Alpha One's response automatic. Davenport, Fletcher, and Hsu immediately scrambled to the nearest cover, Zat guns at the ready, while Pasanen took cover behind the Stargate itself and scanned the scene before him. Alpha Six did not deal quite as well; Gardiner, seeing Russell bravely trying not to vomit at the sight of the corpses around the Stargate, directed Paisley and Murray to the perimeter, while he himself pulled the linguist to cover. A single staff blast split the air, missing Gardiner and Russell by only a few feet; but the lone Jaffa that had fired it never had time to try again. Despite firing freehand, Pasanen dropped the Jaffa off the lip of the gorge with a single bullet.

Pasanen flipped on his radio as the smoke began to clear. "SG-1, this is Martin Pasanen with Alpha One, do you read me?" he called in a loud, clear voice.

This time, there was no answer, only static.

"Alpha One, let's clean up the evidence," Davenport ordered, motioning with his Zat gun. "Six, I want a quick recon."

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
1045 HOURS - LATE AFTERNOON

As far as John Gardiner could tell from the top of the cliff, the gorge was cut out of a high plateau overlooking the base. Even with Alpha 1 disintegrating all the corpses behind him, there was the distinct possibility that more would be here soon. From the skyline, at least, it was fairly obvious that some Goa'uld was on this planet. Outlined in front of the setting sun, a huge pyramid surrounded by dark, almost metallic-looking buildings was flanked by four ha'tak-class pyramid ships, and through his binoculars he could see thousands of Jaffa around the ships, most of them apparently unloading large pieces of cargo. What looked like a whole squadron of death gliders was being moved on carts from one of the ha'taks to the base. From all appearances, the Goa'uld had just arrived recently and was shipping in arms and equipment.

"Hey, Murray, take a look at those Jaffa," he said to the only Stargate veteran on his team. "Recognize the helmets?"

As he pulled himself onto the lip of the gorge, Orlando Murray reached out and took the binoculars from Gardiner's outstretched hand. "Don't know, sir," he answered. "Mostly serpent guards, but since Apophis died, I can think of at least half a dozen System Lords... wait a minute."

"See something?"

"There's one more column just coming out of a mothership. Horned helmets. Looks like the snake's here in person. It's Baal. No... yes, it's definitely Baal."

Gardiner nodded. "Better stay clear of them if we can, then. I'd say our first priority is finding somewhere we can take cover, and then we try and figure out if SG-1's okay."

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
2200 HOURS MSK

"Mr. Komarinsky, I've got a man on the line who wants to talk to you."

"Who is it, and what's his business?" Komarinsky replied gruffly. This had better be worth his time, he thought, or the night manager wouldn't be calling him at home.

"An American, who wants to remain anonymous. He says he has information about the Stargate situation."

"I'll take that call, then. Give him my cell phone number."

"Will do."

"Thank you, Mikhail Ivanovich."

Not ten minutes later, Igor Komarinsky was out on the balcony of his penthouse apartment, notebook in hand, when his cell phone rang.

"Mr. Komarinsky," the voice on the other end of the line said in Russian, with a distinct American accent, "you may call me Fireman." Clearly a code name. Possibly someone involved with the Stargate program itself?

"Before we get started, is there anything you want from me?"

"Only that you refrain from leaking my identity, which should be easy enough given that you do not know it."

"That is what my night manager told me."

"Let us begin, then. I am calling you from Montreal, Canada. You will not be able to contact me at this number when we are done tonight. I am an officer in the United States Marine Corps, assigned to Cheyenne Mountain."

Komarinsky raised an eyebrow, though he knew the speaker would not see it. A disgruntled soldier accusing his commanding officer of something? Immediately doubts appeared in his mind - Komarinsky considered himself a serious newsman. Disgruntled former soldiers were a dime a dozen in Russia in the years after the Soviet Union collapsed, and their allegations were usually ridiculous and not at all newsworthy. But perhaps the cynicism of the new Russia was creeping into his judgment, and things were different in a stable country like the United States.

Fireman continued. "I believe that Brigadier General Jack O'Neill and his Alpha Base are responsible for the recent shutdown of the Earth Stargate. As you may or may not be aware, nearly three-quarters of all Stargate traffic in the past two months have been supply shipments for O'Neill, according to all the records. I personally do not believe that his base needed all the supplies it was allegedly getting, and I suspect that things other than basic supplies are being sent over."

"You're giving me a conspiracy theory that's already on half the news blogs in Russia. Do you have evidence?"

"You will receive in your e-mail, within the next 24 hours, a list of the last ten supply shipments to Alpha Base, indicating both estimated weights based on officially requisitioned items, and the actual weights of the shipments at the time they enter the Gate room. Every single one of them weighs at least twenty percent over the estimate. None of this is classified information. Any American citizen can put in a Freedom of Information Act request for it."

"Interesting, but it's only circumstantial evidence."

"Yes, my friend, but there's a lot more of it." Fireman went on to cite several other statistics, most only tenuously connected to the recent Stargate shutdown but all relating in some way to O'Neill and Alpha Base.

"So there's one thing you're not telling me," Komarinsky cut in. He'd had quite enough, and while some of Fireman's arguments were plausible, others required some stretch of imagination from Komarinsky's admittedly limited knowledge of the Stargate program. "What motive does O'Neill have to do this, and how would he carry it out?"

"You can see what's blocking the Stargate," Fireman answered. "It's very simple. Someone is dialing in from another planet, every thirty-eight minutes exactly. It is not hard to build a robot that will do that automatically, with the resources that a typical US military base has. As for his motive, I am trying to find out myself. I will call you again when I know more. Good night, Mr. Komarinsky."

"Wait a minute..."

But Fireman had already hung up, leaving Komarinsky more puzzled than ever.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006  
1700 HOURS - AFTER MIDNIGHT

"Clearly they were in this village at some point, unless Baal's taken to planting Air Force issue socks around here."

"Don't rule it out, Kevin. Didn't you know it's the best way to distract an unsuspecting human?" Kat Fletcher didn't even look up from her lukewarm cup of coffee, but her voice was full of barely concealed mirth.

Just for effect, Kevin Hsu held the sock up in the air in front of him. "So he's intentionally got us chasing lost socks, then. Diabolical. Just diabolical."

"Yupyup, very."

You know what bothers me?" Hsu said after a long pause, spreading a map out on the floor of the mud hut. "Other than the fact that we've had no radio contact with SG-1 since we got here, that is."

"Mmhmm?" Fletcher lazily raised her head, and inclined it the way she seemed to do whenever she was deep in thought.

"I was getting messages from Julio every day for a week, and not once did he mention that huge Goa'uld base over there," Hsu continued, gesturing in the general direction of the buildings they had seen. "It's nowhere on any of the maps that SG-1 sent back."

"Kind of bothered me too. Any theories?" came a voice from the doorway, as John Gardiner, who had just been on watch, ducked under the low frame and came in.

"I was hoping one of you would have one," the doctor replied.

Hsu, Fletcher, and Gardiner were the only three still awake. The two teams had found shelter for the night in an abandoned, largely burnt-out village about three miles south of the Stargate. The ghost towns dotted the landscape east of the Goa'uld base, and most of the larger ones had been found by SG-1 in the past week. This one was the second that the Alpha teams had passed through, and both appeared to have been abandoned long ago. The base, on the other hand, whose giant pyramid seemed to dominate the horizon even from this distance, was nowhere in SG-1's reports.

"Well, I for one don't think Baal's been here for more than a couple days," Gardiner mused. "I'm thinking he must have found something pointing to a buried complex, and come here to excavate it. Only one hole in that theory, which is how they dug it out so fast."

Hsu nodded. "Hell of a lot of dirt to move."

"Not to mention, there'd be just a little bit of a hill there unless they raised the whole thing out of the ground."

"Well, you'll be the first to know if I come up with anything better," Hsu said hesitantly. He glanced over at Fletcher, hoping she would have something to say. The girl shrugged her shoulders with a very nervous smile and took another sip of her coffee. He'd seen that plenty, with her being as regular a guest as she was - this was the "confused little kid" face for when she didn't want to have to comment.

"Sure," Gardiner said. "Oh, and Fletcher, it's your turn," he added as he moved to the back of the hut and unrolled his bedding.

Fletcher nodded, and quickly got ready to take her watch. The expression on her face changed in an instant to quiet determination, and within a minute, with her shoulder-length blond hair tied back and covered with a black bandanna, and pistol in hand, she stepped out into the darkness.

She had not been outside for five minutes when she stuck her head back into the doorway, looking quite nervous again. "Kevin!" she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I'm not sure I can handle this."

Hsu's first thought was that she needed someone out there with her to boost her confidence. As a civilian, he had never been asked to stand watch himself, but he could see how nerve-wracking it might be for someone like her. Especially alone, in the middle of the night, in hostile and unfamiliar territory. But then Kat Fletcher had always been a night owl, and there was no sign of fear in her eyes; besides, Hsu suspected that she could take care of herself better than he could himself in such situations. His next thought was: what if there's really trouble outside, and she needs backup? Why wasn't she waking everyone else? Finally, Hsu decided that something minor must have come up, probably something that she should have been able to take care of on her own. Maybe she just needed moral support, which wouldn't be at all unlike her. He followed.

The girl led him around another hut, to where they could see a lone man in the center of the village, wearing a loincloth and leopard skin, laying two throwing spears and a large oval shield on the ground in the light of a torch planted beside him. As they watched from the shadows, Fletcher's gun pointed at the man the entire time, he worked himself into a ritualistic frenzy, raising his hands in the air and dancing wildly around the torch. Finally, after this had gone on for several minutes, he sat down in front of his shield, cross-legged, and closed his eyes as if in meditation.

Suddenly, Hsu heard distant footsteps somewhere behind him. He looked down at Fletcher, who had already turned to him and was indicating, with hand signs, that she would go see what was there. She handed him a second pistol - arming a Zat gun now would make too much noise - and headed back toward the footsteps. Hsu, meanwhile, took a step forward, so that he could lean against the wall at his side. Fletcher's shoulder bumped into him and she stumbled slightly.

Apparently the man heard all three pairs of feet in motion, because he suddenly grabbed a spear and jumped to his feet, shouting what sounded like a challenge. Fletcher stopped in her tracks, unsure of whether to go toward the unknown intruder behind or the armed man that Hsu was facing. "Don't worry about me, I think I can handle this," the doctor whispered urgently, and he waved the young lieutenant back toward the source of the footsteps.

Hsu spoke no Zulu, but he stepped into the open to try and start a dialogue anyway. "Jambo, bwana!" he ventured in Swahili, reasoning that both languages shared a common Bantu root and hoping that the man would speak a similar enough language to understand. The man blinked and nodded hesitantly, as if unsure how to answer.

"Tunakuja kwa amani," the doctor added - "we come peacefully" - but he drew only a blank stare. It was obvious by now that the tribesman hardly understood what Hsu had said.

He did, however, realize that he was being addressed, because he responded with a question in a suspicious tone of voice: "Wena ungubani?" (1)

The sounds of a scuffle came from behind Hsu. He swallowed involuntarily. There was a fight going on behind him, and in front of him was a suspicious native with whom he had no common language, pointing a spear at him. Although there was no doubt whose weapon was likely to win if it came to it, Hsu wasn't sure he could bring himself to shoot the man confronting him. Shooting in the air - that was a thought, but it could easily backfire on him. Now he could hear muffled voices to his rear, and he moved to press his back against a wall, fervently hoping that the voices belonged to the cavalry.

* * *

(1) Rough translation from Zulu: "You! Who are you?" 

Love the story? Hate it?Am I still dragging my feet plot-wise? Please let me know!


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